Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It=?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=99s_?=. Seizable (Threat Level blog at Wired.com)

[Rafik Dammak]

hello,

a "thought paper" prepared by ICANN security team just published yesterday
about seizures and takedown

http://blog.icann.org/2012/03/thought-paper-on-domain-seizures-and-takedowns/

Best,

Rafik Dammak
@rafik
"fight for the users"



2012/3/9 DeeDee Halleck <deedeehalleck at gmail.com>

> 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 <david_kravets at wired.com>
> 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>
> Follow @dmkravets <http://twitter.com/dmkravets>
>
>  [image: []]
> <http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/03/unclesam.jpeg>
>
> 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>|
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>
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>
>
>
>
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