U.S. Shuts Down 84,000 Websites By Mistake

[froggyboy604]

The U.S. government accidentally shut down over 80,000 websites while in the process of shutting down domains related to child porn and counterfeit goods.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice and Homeland Securities Office set out to seize domains believed to be involved in child pornography and counterfeit goods. Unfortunately, the operation didn’t exactly go off without a hitch as 87,000 domain owners were faced with this message on Friday:



TorrentFreak reports that one of the targeted domains actually belonged to a DNS provider, which was why so many innocent people were faced with ‘the banner’ on Friday.

Torrent Freak:

“As with previous seizures, ICE convinced a District Court judge to sign a seizure warrant, and then contacted the domain registries to point the domains in question to a server that hosts the warning message. However, somewhere in this process a mistake was made and as a result the domain of a large DNS service provider was seized.”

Things were finally fixed by Sunday, but having such a warning appear on your website for any length of time can be harmful to one’s credibility. According to TF, one affected user had to post the following message on his site in an attempt to curb the bad impression a distribution of child pornography warning carries:

“You can rest assured that I have not and would never be found to be trafficking in such distasteful and horrific content. A little sleuthing shows that the whole of the mooo.com TLD is impacted. At first, the legitimacy of the alerts seems to be questionable — after all, what reputable agency would display their warning in a fancily formatted image referenced by the underlying HTML? I wouldn’t expect to see that.”

For its part, the DHS has apparently neglected to acknowledge the blunder.

Read the full story on Torrent Freak.

Toms Hardware

This is disappointing that ICE can shut down websites by accident and accuse them of displaying child porn when their website has no porn.

 

[GracefulAssassin]

Kind of funny how it was a mistake...

 

[froggyboy604]

Indeed, it is kind of funny that the US seems to make a lot of mistakes online, but being labeled a child porn website by US ICE police can ruin a websites reputation especially if the website is a kids websites since it is not a good reputation to have.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

well this makes me feel safe with my forum/domain link.

 

[Black Angel]

I hope that these webmasters are able to respond with a class action suit against ICE not only on the grounds of defamation of character and libel, but to have access to their sites restored.

Even if they lose, it would send a message to this agency that they can't go around accusing innocent people of being child pornographers and expect to get away with it without consequence..

It does not surprise me in the least that DHS would refuse to acknowledge the screw up.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

no one acknowledges a screw up unless you hold a gun to their head.

 

[froggyboy604]

According to the article the sites were returned to the rightful owners as of Sunday, but they were labeled child pornographers for about 3 days.

I think if ICE just displayed a "page not found" error website owners won't be as upset instead of having a warning page that a website is seized by ICE because of child porn crimes.

ICE US Police seems to accuse people without a court case where the website owners are proven guilty.

 

[Nexus]

Thank god I didn't get that message. How dumb of the government.