Mass Censorship

February 17, 2011 permalink

Now that the internet has contributed to the overthrow of governments in Tunisia and Egypt, authorities are catching on to its power. Enclosed articles show efforts in the US and Europe to shut down websites. The USA has just engaged in its third round of seizing domain names without legal process. Earlier seizures used copyright as the pretext, this round is for child pornography. A mistake in the seizure list crippled one domain hosting 84,000 innocent websites. The European article focuses on protection from kiddie porn. Swedish Pirate Party MEP Christian Engström regards appeals to stop child abuse as a pretext for introducing censorship generally.

Fixcas, and just about every other website critical of official policy, may be on a future seizure. While there is no child pornography here, administrators acting without legal process can easily find something offensive in one of the thousands of articles on children.

Another form of censorship is keeping websites out of a country through a national firewall. Examination of the leading Chinese search engine, Baidu, shows that fixcas, Canada Court Watch and bill131.ca are blocked, though afterfostercare is allowed in. The leading Russian search engine, Yandex, returns results for all four sites. Notwithstanding the censorship, China is a large consumer of the bandwidth delivered by fixcas. So far is has not been determined whether this is malicious hacking or consumers finding a back door.

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U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’

Ernesto, 16/02/2011

The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

As part of “Operation Save Our Children” ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center has again seized several domain names, but not without making a huge error. Last Friday, thousands of site owners were surprised by a rather worrying banner that was placed on their domain.

“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,” was the worrying message they read on their websites.

As with previous seizures, ICE convinced a District Court judge to sign a seizure warrant, and then contacted the domain registries to point the domains in question to a server that hosts the warning message. However, somewhere in this process a mistake was made and as a result the domain of a large DNS service provider was seized.

The domain in question is mooo.com, which belongs to the DNS provider FreeDNS. It is the most popular shared domain at afraid.org and as a result of the authorities’ actions a massive 84,000 subdomains were wrongfully seized as well. All sites were redirected to the banner below.

This banner was visible on the 84,000 sites

The FreeDNS owner was taken by surprise and quickly released the following statement on their website. “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.”

Eventually, on Sunday the domain seizure was reverted and the subdomains slowly started to point to the old sites again instead of the accusatory banner. However, since the DNS entries have to propagate, it took another 3 days before the images disappeared completely.

Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses. A search on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the site’s owners.

One of the customers quickly went out to assure visitors that his site was not involved in any of the alleged crimes.

“You can rest assured that I have not and would never be found to be trafficking in such distasteful and horrific content. A little sleuthing shows that the whole of the mooo.com TLD is impacted. At first, the legitimacy of the alerts seems to be questionable — after all, what reputable agency would display their warning in a fancily formatted image referenced by the underlying HTML? I wouldn’t expect to see that.”

Even at the time of writing people can still replicate the effect by adding “74.81.170.110 mooo.com” to their hosts file as the authorities have not dropped the domain pointer yet. Adding mooo.com will produce a different image than picking a random domain (child porn vs. copyright), which confirms the mistake.

Although it is not clear where this massive error was made, and who’s responsible for it, the Department of Homeland security is conveniently sweeping it under the rug. In a press release that went out a few hours ago the authorities were clearly proud of themselves for taking down 10 domain names.

However, DHS conveniently failed to mention that 84,000 websites were wrongfully taken down in the process, shaming thousands of people in the process.

“Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released on the Internet,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano commented.

“DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from further victimization,” she added.

A noble initiative, but one that went wrong, badly. The above failure again shows that the seizure process is a flawed one, as has been shown several times before in earlier copyright infringement sweeps. If the Government would only allow for due process to take place, this and other mistakes wouldn’t have been made.

Coverage on previous copyright related seizures can be found here, here and here.

Source: Torrent Freak

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XBIZ Newswire

European Parliament Decides to Block Child Porn at Source

By Bob Johnson, XBIZ.com, Wed, Feb 16 2011 02:00pm PST

BRUSSELS — The European Parliament decided yesterday that European Union member states must attempt to block child porn images at the source rather than forcing complete Internet blocking.

Reports said that members of the Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee ruled that blocking access to websites is acceptable only in exceptional circumstances as when a host server from a non-E.U. member country refuses to cooperate or takes too long to comply.

The unanimous 40-0 vote sides with Internet rights activists and Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who were concerned about Internet freedom.

"The new generation of MEPs has shown it understands the Internet and has courageously rejected populist but ineffective and cosmetic measures in favor of measures aimed at real child protection," said Joe McNamee, of the European digital rights movement EDRi.

He added, "This is a huge and implausible success for an army of activists campaigning to protect the democratic, societal and economic value of the Internet," he added.

The move supports the idea that simply blocking a website does not guarantee that some offensive images may remain in cyberspace. And blocking could mistakenly remove a site that supports child protection as was the case where a Dutch website reportedly campaigning against child abuse was blocked twice by mistake.

Blocking will be permitted under unusual circumstances but the ruling stated it "Must be set by transparent procedures and provide adequate safeguards, in particular to ensure that the restriction is limited to what is necessary and proportionate, and that users are informed of the reason for the restriction."

In addition, content providers must be informed of their right to appeal.

But some supporters of child protection are concerned. "MEPs seem more concerned with the rights of child pornographers than they do with the rights of children who have been sexually abused," said John Carr of the Children's Charities Coalition on Internet Safety.

The European Commission also suggested that sites hosted outside of the E.U. could be blocked by law enforcement agencies or that it may assist ISPs by developing codes of conduct and guidelines for blocking access on a voluntary basis.

The decision also calls for tougher penalties for those who sexually abuse or exploit children that include a minimum penalty for 22 criminal offenses, including so-called online "grooming" of children, and allowing E.U. member states to impose tougher measures and sentencing.

Source: XBIZ Newswire