Seems like they did it following prescribed procedure. Good thing is any person aggrieved can always seek relief in district court. ============================== Carlton A Samuels Mobile: 876-818-1799 Strategy, Planning, Governance, Assessment & Turnaround ============================= On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Dev Anand Teelucksingh <admin@ttcsweb.org>wrote:
NYTimes : U.S. Shuts Down Web Sites in Piracy Crackdown By BEN SISARIO Published: November 26, 2010
"In what appears to be the latest phase of a far-reaching federal crackdown on online piracy of music and movies, the Web addresses of a number of sites that facilitate illegal file-sharing were seized this week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security.
By Friday morning, visiting the addresses of a handful of sites that either hosted unauthorized copies of films and music or allowed users to search for them elsewhere on the Internet produced a notice that said, in part: “This domain name has been seized by ICE — Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court.”
In taking over the sites’ domain names, or Web addresses, the government effectively redirected any visitors to its own takedown notice.
“ICE office of Homeland Security Investigations executed court-ordered seizure warrants against a number of domain names,” said Cori W. Bassett, a spokeswoman for ICE, in a statement. “As this is an ongoing investigation, there are no additional details available at this time.”
Read full article : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/technology/27torrent.html
Also, OSNews.com also reporting on the story says :
"...The US has started seizing the domain names of various websites through ICANN.......The seizures come from the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and cover about 70 websites relating to potential copyright infringement and counterfeit goods, among which is Torrent-Finder.com, a mere torrent search engine which does not host or even link to torrents; it displays content hosted elsewhere through embedded iframes. "My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the owner of Torrent-Finder explained TorrentFreak, “I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN."
Read OSNews.com article : http://www.osnews.com/story/24074/US_Government_Censors_70_Websites
So, how does that work? The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement served the seizure warrant on the gTLD registry and the gTLD registry then updated the DNS records for that domain name to point to ICE's DNS servers?
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Dev Anand Teelucksingh
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