US Government censors 70 websites for whole world

[Joanne98]

The US is really ramping up its war on intellectual property infringement, a war which I’m sure will be just as successful, cheap and supported by the people as the wars on drugs and terrorism. The US has started seizing the domain names of various websites through ICANN – not because owners of these sites were convicted of anything, but merely because complaints have been filed against them. Anyone want to take a guess how long it will be before the US government blocks WikiLeaks?

The current seizures of domains did not even use the recently passed censorship law. 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.”

This is equivalent to having your house seized for pointing out to someone you can buy weed in the college district. The craziness goes even further – ordinary search engines are really effective at finding unauthorised copyrighted content as well. You can use Google to find the latest Parenthood episode in 720p, and Bing, too, is pretty good at it. Why aren’t we seeing notices for these domains as well?

Body scanners, sexual assault patdowns, censorship laws, seizure of property without even a notice (let alone a court order or conviction), even without doing or having done anything illegal. Welcome to the police state. It won’t be long now until the US government – and other government will surely follow – will start blocking websites that do not fall within the government’s favour. I’m sure WikiLeaks is being put on censorship lists as we speak.

http://landofthefreeish.com/politics/us-government-censors-70-websites-for-whole-world/