VeriSign demands website takedown powers

[Marc Perkel]

On 10/11/2011 7:04 AM, Alex Gakuru wrote:
> No court order necessary
> By Kevin Murphy
> 11th October 2011
>
> <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/11/verisign_asks_for_web_takedown_powers/>
>

Thanks for the heads up Alex. I have some mixed feeling about this as I
am someone who wears two hats. So I'll throw the delema out there and
see what you all think.

First - as the founder of the Church of Reality and a former employee of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation (sys admin - not lawyer) I and a
fierce defender of free speech and due process, keeping the hands of
governments off the Internet. The Internet is actually considered a holy
object in the Church of Reality as it is the central factor driving
human evolution allowing us to evolve into something that increases our
chances of long term survival, so we can continue to exist. If you fail
to continue to exist then you are no longer part of reality.

Then there's my second hat. I also own a spam filtering company where
every day I block millions of emails from people pretending to be banks
and trying to trick you into giving up your login so that criminals can
steal your money. It is a private sector business and I can instantly
block a domain that is clearly committing fraud. So a domain like
wellssfargo.com (note the double S) pretending to be Wells Fargo Bank is
immediately blocked by me - and every other server on the planet who
uses my blacklist.

Then there's Wikileaks which I support and which most every government
out there wants shut down.

Just wondering if it would be useful to have some sort of discussion
about this for the sake of clarity.