ICE: Domain Seizures Same as Car, Bank Account Seizures

[nsane.forums]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton says it can seize anything "associated with the crime," but a number of the sites were either legal in their home country or contained content that was clearly noninfringing.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton has come out in defense of the nearly 100 domain name seizures it has carried out so far as part of the ongoing "Operation in Our Sites," but he seems to have a curious distortion of the letter of the law.

"Often we get the criticism that we're trying to infringe on free speech, regulate the Internet – nothing can be further from the truth," he told POLITICO late last week. "We have no interest in regulating the Internet. We have no responsibility in doing that; we're a law enforcement agency. We investigate crimes and try to deter criminal activity. We're trying to protect the rights of American consumers, American manufacturers."

However, that's exactly what it's doing. ICE is seizing speech, and rather than protecting people's rights it's arguably violating them instead.

The Center for Democracy and Technology noted last September that the "First Amendment teaches that speech should be pro-actively blocked only in the rarest of circumstances. This is especially true because the type of restraint imposed by S. 3804 – the total suspension or blocking of a siteʼs domain name – would unavoidably block lawful content as well as infringing content."

Worse still, the domain seizures involve parties well outside the US, and therefore largely unable to seek a full and fair trial to contest the seizure. In the case of Rojadirecta.org ICE completely disregarded the fact that Spanish courts have ruled the site legal in that country.

He compares domain seizures to other forms like bank accounts, houses, and vehicles – anything that is "associated with the crime."

"Any instrument of a crime is subject to our jurisdiction in terms of seizure and forfeit," he said.

He adds that ICE doesn't "have any interest in going after bloggers or discussion boards, but a number of sites seized were just that. Four of the sites were hiphop related music blogs, but part of the "evidence" of the alleged infringement included songs that record labels specifically sent those blogs to promote.

What about the part of the blogs that weren't infringing? And why does ICE feel compelled to use criminal laws to target these sites when civil laws could suffice? Sooner or later other countries are going to tire of the US govt seizing sites as it sees fit.

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