Congress to Homeland Security – “WTF?”
“Our concern centers on your Department’s methods, and the process given, when seizing the domain names of websites whose actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech,” read part of a letter sent by members of Congress to the US Department of Homeland Security regarding a slew of domain seizures performed in the name of preventing the potential civil tort of copyright infringement.
Yes, you read that correctly. The US Department of Homeland Security, for whatever reason, had decided to take up the enforcement of civil law and embarrassingly failed to demonstrate any competent level of understanding of US law or how it is to be enforced.
Why was DHS created and what are they supposed to be doing anyway? Well, let’s be more specific instead of letting one bad apple spoil the whole bunch. It was Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that was directly responsible for this blatant disregard for our basic American civil liberties. ICE is “responsible for identifying, investigating, and dismantling vulnerabilities regarding the nation’s border, economic, transportation, and infrastructure security.” It’s not a huge leap to assume that this half-cocked campaign of seizing web domains was brewed by whatever department of theirs is charged with protecting the country from economic threats. One can only imagine how dull and inferior you must feel when other departments are up against terrorist threats and drug cartels and here you are, the guy who is supposed to stop any outside force from blowing over the delicately stacked card pyramid that is our nation’s economy. Who is responsible for all of the economic damage we’ve endured? The internet pirates of course. Initiate scapegoat sequence.
So without any authority to get involved in civil law, they went ahead and treated a few websites which they assumed to be infringing some copyright or another to be doing so at a criminal level. With the graceful and majestic simultaneousness of a group of synchronized swimmers, they also completely forgot that, by decree of criminal law:
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech
Mmmm yeah. Smell the immature gloating. Did every individual and organization with an ounce of datalove for our online civil rights tell you so? Yes. Yes we did.
No Congress, and the rest of us, are waiting for answer. Nobody knows wtf DHS was thinking, but it is nice to see Congress showing some level of recognition of this blatant disregard for our freedom of speech.
Check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation website where the story broke for more details.
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