NEW BOT Телеграм, страница

Forwarded from Ramiro Romani's neo-network

Year after year, NIPRCC & ICE have come up with cute names for their operations to go after sites that sell counterfeit goods. This started at a small scale at first, with tens to a few hundred domain names being seized, and then grew in size after operation Transatlantic, which seized close to 30,000 domain names.

The latest operation which has been publicly released actually seized over a million websites. Again, they target copyright-infringing sites that sell various fake goods which can range from counterfeit clothing to counterfeit airplane parts.

Though only around 33K websites were criminally seized (transferred into the hands of Homeland Security), an additional 1.21 domain names were civilly seized by ‘industry partners'.

What ‘civilly’ seized means isn't fully explained, but one could surmise that the internet service providers or domain registrars for those zones took measures to strip ownership from the targeted sites.

There aren't any details about the monetary seizures from these new operations, but in past operations we've seen sums of up to 1M seized from the criminal organizations.

Is there a monetary incentive for these agencies to conduct seizures? How much have they seized from the latest operations?

Either way, I'm not sure how much safer I feel being protected from the horrors of the counterfeit basketball jersey industry. 🏀🗑

How Does This Work?

Now that we're aware that this happens at a large scale, and why it may occur, let's discuss how it happens.

First of all, the entire seizure process happens before a trial even takes place. This is allowed through the US forfeiture laws (mentioned earlier in this article).

In the case of these copyright domain seizures, a magistrate judge can grant a seizure warrant based on probable cause. (and they can be convinced to do this based on in-person testimony / hearsay).

Here's an example of one of these seizure warrants in the 2018 takedown of ToKnowAll by the FBI. The request was sent in on Tuesday and was granted the next day.

The process is actually simple and outlined in the warrant itself.

1. The government agency finds the domain registrar hosting the target domain, which must be under its jurisdiction.
2. The Magistrate Judge must find probable cause a crime has been committed and agree on the seizure.
3. The agency then serves the registrar with a seizure warrant, in which the registrar is required to shift registration of that domain to the agency

Is This Even Effective?

By now you must realize that this doesn't actually scrub the content off the internet, it merely makes it inaccessible by its domain name. New domains can be registered in its place, and the IP address can be even be bookmarked by individuals for later use.

Additionally, this domain seizure practice is heavy handed and can be inaccurate. The Center for Democracy & Technology pointed out one case of mistaken seizure targeting a parent domain of thousands of other individual & separate sites.

There's even been instances of the operating taking down legal sites in foreign countries. In 2011, ICE seized a domain from RojaDirecta, a sports streaming site which was declared legal in Spain. A international legal battle ensued which led ICE to give it back.

We must wonder why we allow these practices to continue. It is wrong to have domains seized on ‘probable cause’ without due process. It happens without warning from the owners, and destroys the value of the domain by directing users to splash pages accusing the owners of crimes.

In the second & final part of this article, we will discuss how countries like China implement country-wide censorship and how individuals & developers can utilize old & new technologies to avoid being walled in.

🧱🧱🌤
Read more at @neo_network
Discuss with digital warriors at @neo_network_chat

1.02K views19:14