In case you haven't been following the cases mentioned here, please note
that, even before arraignments of people who've been accused of violating
U.S. laws that may not have any parallels in their home countries -- if
charges are ever filed at all -- much less before extradition or
conviction, the U.S. government may seize all property including homes,
cars & bank accounts of the domain name owners. So it's not merely
("merely"!) a matter of losing a website or an online business or thousands
of clients. It's a matter of losing all life & freedom as you've known it.
Coming from a country whose president claims the right to use drones to
kill 16-year-old American citizens (not to mention thousands of foreign
civilians, which he doesn't) on the other side of the world, such actions
shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, but that doesn't make them any
less shocking or horrendous.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/
*Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable*By David
Kravets<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/author/davidkravets/>
Email Author <[log in to unmask]>
March 6, 2012 | 6:30 am | Categories: intellectual
property<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/category/intellectual-property/>,
politics <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/category/politics/> |
Edit<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/wp-admin/post.php?post=38484&action=edit>
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When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last week,
it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was registered
with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the reach of the U.S.
government. Working around that, the feds went directly to VeriSign, a
U.S.-based internet backbone company that has the contract to manage the
coveted .com and other “generic” top-level domains.
EasyDNS, an internet infrastructure company,
protested<http://blog2.easydns.org/2012/02/29/verisign-seizes-com-domain-registered-via-foreign-registrar-on-behalf-of-us-authorities/>that
the “ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single
organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc. needs
to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of U.S. federal
and state lawmakers.”
But despite EasyDNS and others’ outrage, the U.S. government says it’s gone
that route hundreds of times. Furthermore, it says it has the right to
seize any .com, .net and .org domain name because the companies that have
the contracts to administer them are based on United States soil, according
to Nicole Navas, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman.
The controversy highlights the unique control the U.S. continues to hold
over key components of the global domain name system, and rips a Band-Aid
off a historic sore point for other nations. A complicated web of
bureaucracy and Commerce Department-dictated
contracts<http://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/ntiahome/domainname/agreements/summary-factsheet.htm>signed
in 1999 established that key domains would be contracted out to
Network Solutions, which was acquired by VeriSign in 2000. That cemented
control of all-important .com and .net domains with a U.S. company –
VeriSign – putting every website using one of those addresses firmly within
reach of American courts regardless of where the owners are located –
possibly forever.
The government, Navas said, usually serves court-ordered seizures on
VeriSign, which manages domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv and .name,
because “foreign-based registrars are not bound to comply with U.S. court
orders.” The government does the same with the non-profit counterpart to
VeriSign that now manages the .org domain. That’s the Public Interest
Registry <http://www.pir.org/home>, which, like VeriSign, is based in
Virginia.
Such seizures are becoming commonplace under the Obama administration. For
example, the U.S. government program known as Operation in Our
Sites<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/sports-domains-seized/>acquires
federal court orders to shutter sites it believes are hawking
counterfeited goods, illegal sports streams and unauthorized movies and
music. Navas said the U.S. government has seized 750 domain names, “most
with foreign-based registrars.”
VeriSign, for its part, said it is complying with U.S. law.
“VeriSign responds to lawful court orders subject to its technical
capabilities,” the company said in a statement. “When law enforcement
presents us with such lawful orders impacting domain names within our
registries, we respond within our technical capabilities.”
VeriSign declined to entertain questions about how many times it has done
this. It often complies with U.S. court orders by redirecting the DNS
(Domain Name System) of a domain to a U.S. government IP address that
informs online visitors that the site has been seized (for example,
ninjavideo.net.)
“Beyond that, further questions should be directed to the appropriate U.S.
federal government agency responsible for the domain name seizure,” the
company said.
The Public Interest Registry did not immediately respond for comment.
Bodog.com was targeted because federal law generally makes it illegal to
offer online sports wagering and to payoff online bets in the United
States, even though online gambling isn’t illegal globally.
Bodog.com was registered with a Canadian registrar<http://www.domainclip.com/>,
a VeriSign subcontractor, but the United States shuttered the site without
any intervention from Canadian authorities or companies.
Instead, the feds went straight to
VeriSign<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign>.
It’s a powerful company deeply enmeshed in the backbone operations of the
internet, including managing the .com infrastructure and operating root
name servers. VeriSign has a cozy relationship with the federal government,
and has long had a contract from the U.S. government to help manage the
internet’s “root file” that is key to having a unified internet name system.
Still, the issue of the U.S.’s legal dominion claim over all .com domains
wasn’t an issue in the January seizure of the domain of megaupload.com,
which is implicated in one of the largest criminal copyright cases in U.S.
history<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/megaupload-indicted-shuttered/>.
Megaupload.com was registered in the United States with a registrar based
in Washington state.
The United States would have won even more control over the internet with
the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. But the nation’s biggest
online protest ever scuttled the measures, which would have allowed the
government to force internet service providers in the U.S. to prevent
Americans from being able to visit or find in search engines websites that
the U.S. government suspected violated U.S. copyright or trademark law.
But as the Justice Department demonstrated forcefully with the takedown of
Megaupload, just a day after the net’s coordinated anti-SOPA protest, it
still has powerful weapons to use, despite the deaths of SOPA and PIPA.
So how does International Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN>,
the global body that oversees the domain-naming system, feel about the U.S.
government’s actions? ICANN declined comment and forwarded a 2010 blog post
from it’s chief Rod Beckstrom, who said ICANN has “ no involvement in the
takedown of any
website<http://blog.icann.org/2010/12/icann-doesn%E2%80%99t-take-down-websites/>
.”
ICANN, a non-profit established by the U.S., has never awarded a contract
to manage the .com space to a company outside the United States in fact
VeriSign has always held it despite having a contentious relationship
with ICANN that’s involved a protracted
lawsuit<http://www.icann.org/en/news/litigation/verisign-v-icann>.
But, due to contract terms, VeriSign is unlikely to ever lose control over
the immensely economically valuable .com handle.
ICANN is also seeking to distance itself from the U.S. government by being
more inclusive, including allowing domain names in a range of written,
global languages, ending the
exclusivity<http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/icann-international-scripts/>of
the Latin alphabet in top-level domains.
Still, many outside the United States, like China, India and Russia,
distrust ICANN and want control of the net’s naming system to be turned
over to an organization such as the International Telecommunications Union,
an affiliate of the United Nations. Last year, Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin met with Hamadoun Toure, the ITU’s chief, and said he wanted
international control over the internet “using the monitoring capabilities
of the International Telecommunication Union.”
“If we are going to talk about the democratization of international
relations, I think a critical sphere is information exchange and global
control over such exchange,” Putin said, according to a transcript from the
Russian government<http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/12/issues-for-2012-1-should-the-u.php>
.
Just last week, Robert McDowell, a Federal Communications Commission
commissioner, blasted such an idea.
“If successful, these efforts would merely imprison the future in the
regulatory dungeon of the past,” he
said<http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/02/fcc-commissioner-ending-icann.php>.
“Even more counterproductive would be the creation of a new international
body to oversee internet governance.”
ICANN was established in 1998 by the Clinton administration, and has been
under global attack to internationalize the control of the Domain Name
System ever since. A United Nations working group in
2005<http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2005/11/69586?currentPage=all>concluded
that “no single government should have a pre-eminent role in
relation to international internet governance.”
But those pressures don’t seem to have registered with President Barack
Obama’s Justice Department. Hollywood was a big donor to Obama, and Obama
reciprocated by naming at least five former Recording Industry Association
of America attorneys<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/riaa-verdict-is-unreasonable/>to
posts in the Justice Department, which has been waging a crackdown on
internet piracy. The Justice Department is looking for even more money in
next year’s budget to hire more intellectual-property prosecutors.
Without SOPA or PIPA, the Justice Department lacks any mechanism to prevent
Americans from visiting sites that are on a domain not controlled by a U.S.
corporation. Knowing that, the world’s leading BitTorrent site, The Pirate
Bay, recently switched its main site from a .org domain to .se, the handle
for Sweden.
The Pirate Bay’s lead is unlikely to be followed by the millions of
non-U.S. companies that rely on .com, which remains the net’s beachfront
real estate, even if it is subject to being confiscated by the U.S.
But it is possible that the U.S. government’s big-footing over dot-com
domains in the name of fighting copyright could add more weight to the
arguments of those who want to put the U.N. in charge of the internet’s
naming system. While that’s not inevitably a bad thing, it could lead to a
world where any .com might be seizable by any country, including Russia,
Libya and Iran.
Still, don’t expect Uncle Sam to give up its iron grip on .com without a
fight.
*David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the
fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been
a reporter since the manual typewriter days.
*Follow @dmkravets <http://www.twitter.com/dmkravets> and
@ThreatLevel<http://www.twitter.com/ThreatLevel>on Twitter.
Tags: DNS Redirect <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/dns-redirect/>,
ICAAN <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/icaan/>,
VeriSign<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/verisign/>
Post Comment<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/#comments>|
*348 Comments and 1382
Reactions*<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/#disqus_thread>
________________________________________________
Shebar Windstone <[log in to unmask]>
Prosecute war criminals, not whistleblowers!
Free Bradley Manning NOW!
http://www.e271.net/~shebar/chmod/
http://www.joannestle.com/
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