In accordance with “Operation Save Our Children,” ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center seized thousands of domain names last week that they thought were questionable. “Thought” being the operative word here. Last Friday, thousands of site owners were surprised to find the following banner in place of their sites:
Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution.
Pretty intense! Unfortunately, ICE didn’t pay close enough attention when they convinced a district court judge to sign a seizure warrant that prompted the domains in question to show the warning message instead of their usual content. Somewhere along the way, the domain mooo.com — which belongs to FreeDNS, a large DNS service provider — was seized and 84,000 subdomains were wrongfully seized as well. The owner of FreeDNS commented on the situation: “Freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type of abuse of its DNS service. We are working to get the issue sorted as quickly as possible.” Several days after the seizure, the non-offending sites were reverted from the warning banners back to their old content. Hmm. Hey Department of Homeland Security, maybe double-check yourself the next time you try to flip the “off” switch on the internet, okay?
