<div dir="ltr">hello,<div><br></div><div>a "thought paper" prepared by ICANN security team just published yesterday about seizures and takedown</div><div> <a href="http://blog.icann.org/2012/03/thought-paper-on-domain-seizures-and-takedowns/">http://blog.icann.org/2012/03/thought-paper-on-domain-seizures-and-takedowns/</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div><br clear="all"><div dir="ltr"><div>Rafik Dammak</div>@rafik<div>"fight for the users"</div></div><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2012/3/9 DeeDee Halleck <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:deedeehalleck@gmail.com">deedeehalleck@gmail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="gmail_quote"><div>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.<div><div><div><p><br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/" target="_blank">
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/</a><br>
<br>
</p><h1><b>Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable</b></h1>By
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/author/davidkravets/" target="_blank">David
Kravets</a> <br>
<a href="mailto:david_kravets@wired.com" target="_blank">Email Author</a> <br>
March 6, 2012 | 6:30 am | Categories:
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/category/intellectual-property/" target="_blank">
intellectual property</a>,
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/category/politics/" target="_blank">politics</a>
|
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/wp-admin/post.php?post=38484&action=edit" target="_blank">
Edit</a> <br>
<a href="http://twitter.com/dmkravets" target="_blank">Follow @dmkravets</a><br><br>
<a href="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/03/unclesam.jpeg" target="_blank">
<img width="650" height="780" alt="[]">
</a><br><br>
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.<br><br>
EasyDNS, an internet infrastructure company,
<a href="http://blog2.easydns.org/2012/02/29/verisign-seizes-com-domain-registered-via-foreign-registrar-on-behalf-of-us-authorities/" target="_blank">
protested</a> 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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/ntiahome/domainname/agreements/summary-factsheet.htm" target="_blank">
complicated web of bureaucracy and Commerce Department-dictated
contracts</a> 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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.pir.org/home" target="_blank">Public Interest Registry</a>, which,
like VeriSign, is based in Virginia.<br><br>
Such seizures are becoming commonplace under the Obama administration.
For example, the U.S. government program known as
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/sports-domains-seized/" target="_blank">
Operation in Our Sites</a> 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.”<br><br>
VeriSign, for its part, said it is complying with U.S. law.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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,
<a href="http://ninjavideo.net/" target="_blank">ninjavideo.net</a>.)<br><br>
“Beyond that, further questions should be directed to the appropriate
U.S. federal government agency responsible for the domain name seizure,”
the company said.<br><br>
The Public Interest Registry did not immediately respond for
comment.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Bodog.com was registered with a
<a href="http://www.domainclip.com/" target="_blank">Canadian registrar</a>, a VeriSign
subcontractor, but the United States shuttered the site without any
intervention from Canadian authorities or companies.<br><br>
Instead, the feds went straight to
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign" target="_blank">VeriSign</a>. 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.<br><br>
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 <a href="http://megaupload.com" target="_blank">megaupload.com</a>,
which is implicated in one of the
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/megaupload-indicted-shuttered/" target="_blank">
largest criminal copyright cases in U.S. history</a>. Megaupload.com was
registered in the United States with a registrar based in Washington
state.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
So how does <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN" target="_blank">International
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers</a>, 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
“<a href="http://blog.icann.org/2010/12/icann-doesn%E2%80%99t-take-down-websites/" target="_blank">
no involvement in the takedown of any website</a>.”<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.icann.org/en/news/litigation/verisign-v-icann" target="_blank">
involved a protracted lawsuit</a>. But, due to contract terms, VeriSign
is unlikely to ever lose control over the immensely economically valuable
.com handle.<br><br>
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,
<a href="http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/icann-international-scripts/" target="_blank">
ending the exclusivity</a> of the Latin alphabet in top-level
domains.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
“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,”
<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/12/issues-for-2012-1-should-the-u.php" target="_blank">
Putin said, according to a transcript from the Russian
government</a>.<br><br>
Just last week, Robert McDowell, a Federal Communications Commission
commissioner, blasted such an idea.<br><br>
“If successful, these efforts would merely imprison the future in the
regulatory dungeon of the past,” he
<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/02/fcc-commissioner-ending-icann.php" target="_blank">
said</a>. “Even more counterproductive would be the creation of a new
international body to oversee internet governance.”<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2005/11/69586?currentPage=all" target="_blank">
United Nations working group in 2005</a> concluded that “no single
government should have a pre-eminent role in relation to international
internet governance.”<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/riaa-verdict-is-unreasonable/" target="_blank">
least five former Recording Industry Association of America attorneys</a>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Still, don’t expect Uncle Sam to give up its iron grip on .com without a
fight.<br><br>
<br><br>
<i>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.<br><br>
</i>Follow <a href="http://www.twitter.com/dmkravets" target="_blank">@dmkravets</a> and
<a href="http://www.twitter.com/ThreatLevel" target="_blank">@ThreatLevel</a> on
Twitter.<br><br>
Tags: <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/dns-redirect/" target="_blank">DNS
Redirect</a>,
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/icaan/" target="_blank">ICAAN</a>,
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/verisign/" target="_blank">VeriSign</a>
<br><br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/#comments" target="_blank">
Post Comment</a> |
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/#disqus_thread" target="_blank">
<b>348 Comments and 1382 Reactions</b></a> <br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier">
________________________________________________<br>
Shebar Windstone <<a href="mailto:shebar@e271.net" target="_blank">shebar@e271.net</a>><br>
</font><font face="Courier, Courier">Prosecute war criminals, not
whistleblowers!<br>
Free Bradley Manning NOW!<br>
</font><font face="Courier New, Courier">
<a href="http://www.e271.net/~shebar/chmod/" target="_blank">
http://www.e271.net/~shebar/chmod/<br>
</a><a href="http://www.joannestle.com/" target="_blank">
http://www.joannestle.com/<br>
</a></font>
<p></p>
</div>
<div style="color:#fff;min-height:0">__._,_.___</div>
<div style="clear:both;margin-bottom:10px;white-space:nowrap;color:#666;padding-top:15px">
<div>
<a href="mailto:shebar@e271.net?subject=Re%3A%20FYI%3A%20Uncle%20Sam%3A%20If%20It%20Ends%20in%20%2ECom%2C%20It%92s%20%2E%20%20Seizable%20%28Threat%20Level%20blog%20at%20Wired%2Ecom%29" style="margin-right:0;padding-right:0" target="_blank">
Reply to <span style="font-weight:700">sender</span></a> |
<a href="mailto:MECRresource@yahoogroups.com?subject=Re%3A%20FYI%3A%20Uncle%20Sam%3A%20If%20It%20Ends%20in%20%2ECom%2C%20It%92s%20%2E%20%20Seizable%20%28Threat%20Level%20blog%20at%20Wired%2Ecom%29" target="_blank">
Reply to <span style="font-weight:700">group</span></a> |
<a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MECRresource/post;_ylc=X3oDMTJxbGF0bzk2BF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzE4NTgwNDc1BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTA0MzkyMQRtc2dJZAM5NjgwBHNlYwNmdHIEc2xrA3JwbHkEc3RpbWUDMTMzMTI0Njc3OQ--?act=reply&messageNum=9680" target="_blank">Reply <span style="font-weight:700">via web post</span></a> |
<a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MECRresource/post;_ylc=X3oDMTJmanJicWEyBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzE4NTgwNDc1BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTA0MzkyMQRzZWMDZnRyBHNsawNudHBjBHN0aW1lAzEzMzEyNDY3Nzk-" style="font-weight:700" target="_blank">Start a New Topic</a>
</div>
<a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MECRresource/message/9680;_ylc=X3oDMTM1amMyNWs3BF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzE4NTgwNDc1BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTA0MzkyMQRtc2dJZAM5NjgwBHNlYwNmdHIEc2xrA3Z0cGMEc3RpbWUDMTMzMTI0Njc3OQR0cGNJZAM5Njgw" target="_blank">Messages in this topic</a>
(<span style="font-weight:700">1</span>)
</div>
<div style="background-color:#e0ecee;font-family:Verdana;font-size:10px;margin-bottom:10px;padding:10px">
<span style="font-weight:bold;color:#333;text-transform:uppercase">Recent Activity:</span>
<ul style="list-style-type:none;margin:0;padding:0;display:inline">
</ul>
<div style="clear:both;padding-top:2px;color:#1e66ae">
<a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MECRresource;_ylc=X3oDMTJmamp0aGJhBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzE4NTgwNDc1BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTA0MzkyMQRzZWMDdnRsBHNsawN2Z2hwBHN0aW1lAzEzMzEyNDY3Nzk-" style="text-decoration:none" target="_blank">Visit Your Group</a>
</div>
</div>
<div style="font-family:Arial;font-size:11px;margin-top:5px;padding:0 2px 0 0;clear:both">
<a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/;_ylc=X3oDMTJlbWQ0MTE2BF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzE4NTgwNDc1BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTA0MzkyMQRzZWMDZnRyBHNsawNnZnAEc3RpbWUDMTMzMTI0Njc3OQ--" style="float:left" target="_blank"><img height="15" width="137" alt="Yahoo! Groups" style="border:0"></a>
<div style="color:#747575;float:right">Switch to: <a href="mailto:MECRresource-traditional@yahoogroups.com?subject=Change+Delivery+Format:+Traditional" style="text-decoration:none" target="_blank">Text-Only</a>, <a href="mailto:MECRresource-digest@yahoogroups.com?subject=Email+Delivery:+Digest" style="text-decoration:none" target="_blank">Daily Digest</a> • <a href="mailto:MECRresource-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com?subject=Unsubscribe" style="text-decoration:none" target="_blank">Unsubscribe</a> • <a href="http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_blank">Terms of Use</a></div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="width:160px;float:right;clear:none;margin:0 0 25px 0;background:#fff">
<div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="clear:both;color:#fff;font-size:1px">.</div>
</div>
<img width="1" height="1"> <br>
<div style="color:#fff;min-height:0">__,_._,___</div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
</font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
</font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div><a href="http://www.deepdishwavesofchange.org" target="_blank">http://www.deepdishwavesofchange.org</a></div><br>
</font></span></blockquote></div><br></div></div>