ICE is taking over web sites - without any prior complaints or notifications from courts

[The Straight Story]

The Deparment of Homeland Security Is Cracking Down On BitTorrent Sites

The Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is seizing domains of BitTorrent sites and sites associated with counterfeit goods. They're taking over sites without any prior complaints or notifications from the court.

It's a little messy because some of the torrent sites ICE has been seizing have no tracker, carry no torrents and list no copyright works unless someone searches for them—they're search engines, well with a torrent slant, of course, but search engines by definition. These seizures definitely raise questions on what type of criteria the Department of Homeland Security is using and raises a dark cloud over similar, un-seized sites. Check out the full list of seized sites here.

http://gizmodo.com/5699862/homeland-security-cracking-down-on-bittorrent-sites

[Edweird]

1. It's good comedy but not much else.

[avaistheone1]

2. Is Obama still in charge?

Seems like all these agencys are out of control.

[L0oniX]

10. Obama ...in charge? Rich machiavellian sociopath corporatist's control the USA.

[SoCalNative]

3. Now if they'd just shut down

the FReeper site, Rush, Beck and all of the other loonies...

[PeaceNikki]

4. Wow... that's fucked up. Here is more info.

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-search-engine-domain-and-more-101126/

Update: A spokeswoman for ICE confirmed the seizures in the following statement. “ICE office of Homeland Security Investigations executed court-ordered seizure warrants against a number of domain names. As this is an ongoing investigation, there are no additional details available at this time.”

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[ThomCat]

5. So the government is now claiming the right to shut down

any site they don't like, immediately, with no notice, without even bothering with a legitimate reason or pretense.

Seriously. Search engines where people looked up a topic? Sites where people discussed a topic? How can they expect anyone to think that these sites participated in illegal conduct? How is this not a blatant and blaring violation of both the 1st, 4th Amendments, and 5th Amendments?

This is definitely government censorship. Seizure without a warrant? Unless someone has seen warrants, or any evidence that any judge anywhere signed off on this, then it certainly seems like this was railroaded through without warrants. Due process? The immediate nature of these take-downs certainly makes it clear that there was no due process.

[PeaceNikki]

6. ICE says there were court-ordered seizure warrants

[ThomCat]

7. It will be interesting to hear, then, how that judge

justifies those warrants to all the lawyers for these site owners. I'm betting that this is not going to make that judge, or ICE, look very good.


Edit to add:

Hmm... So far the only evidence of warrants seems to be a statement from ICE insisting that they had warrants. They haven't shown those warrants publicly. They press doesn't appear to have seen them yet. None of the site owners is quotes anywhere as having seen a warrant that I can find. So that's troublesome. That could mean that they didn't really have warrants. Or that they didn't have warrants Yet, but expected to get them, and were jumping the gun.

I'm sure the site owners are demanding to see those warrants though, to find out first of all what the government's rationale was for all of this was.

[TBF]

8. The patriot act needs to be repealed immediately, along with

immediate disbandment of the fatherland security office.

It is getting worse every day.

[ThomCat]

9. Agreed