This was posted on howardempoweredblog.com: BEWARE!!!

Thursday, May 11, 2006
My Website Was Shutdown, Thanks To DHS
The following is a portion of an email I received yesterday from the domain host for the DFA group website I built. A similar letter was sent to all customers who have accounts on the same server.

Dear 2mHost customer,Around 1:00 pm Eastern time, Wednesday May 10, 2006 server alexandria36 which host your account for domain name alademocracy.org was unplugged by The US Department of Homeland Security agents to seize server hard drives (the main and backupd drive) beacuse of possible illegal contents (we believe its child porn contents), They removed the drives to analyse its contents and logs.
We believe that we will not get the drives back in timely manner. We sincerely apologize for the file lose and understand the seriousness of it, as well as the trouble it has created for you our valued customer.

WTF? I have never had an interest in, nor collected child porn. I deplore any abuse of children, and the mere fact that I have to state this is absolutely disgusting to me. The defense of children is critical, but I thought that the role of Homeland Security (and I despise the Naziistic label) was to protect this county from threats and natural disasters. My tongue is planted firmly in cheek on that one.

What I resent more than the loss of website files, is the idea of a massive bureaucracy that has the ability to shut down anyone's website, business, or livelihood, without Congressional or judicial oversight. Some weeks back, I read about a couple whose account was red-flagged by DHS when they tried to pay a large sum on their credit card. Is this still America anymore?

What's of even more concern is the potential that such an agency could pose to the rights of Americans who disagree with the administration in power - any administration. Given the unchecked power granted to such agencies, what's there to prevent planting "suspicious files" on anyone's computer or home, because you're a little too vocal in your opposition to war in your emails or at work? Does it not sicken you that you're more reluctant to say things you feel about certain people in power in your phone con

...mostly-

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1153183&mesg_id=1159912

You guys are thorough!

The Chimp is at his most dangerous. He's in the 20's, facing impeachment, and has a half-wood for Iran.

the industy best practices is to first notify customers and ask the content be removed if it has porn.

that they are taking the entire servers and not the affected folders tells me they are using porn as a coverup to probe all the other data for other things..

bottom line, it's not standard ISP or Telco practice to ever completely shut you down.. they would simply move the good domains somewhere else with the flick of a DNS entry and take down the servers once all other content was migrated...

bottom line, honey, you have sincere reason to be worried...

have you considered your domain name

alademocracy.org (as being close to allah) and perhaps a scary buzzword to these pinheads? I did actually work close to some ex-cia and the mentality is to jump at anything even close to suspicious.... to test them, setup another domain without ala in the name and see if it gets the same email....

The misspellings and bad grammar MAY be a sign that this is a hoax (as other DU threads have speculated), but they also may be the result of overseas web hosting providers. I have no idea where my web hosting service is located, but based on spelling errors and awkward syntax, it's definitely not in the U.S.

In either case, web servers have large capacities and store dozens, if not hundreds, of different domain accounts. It's not at all unusual for spammers and pornographers to use exactly this kind of service. And when they get investigated, many legitimate businesses can find that their records have been taken off line when the servers are impounded.

I haven't had that extreme a problem with my hosting service, but I have had my server blacklisted (mail from my domain won't pass through AOL filters), which is probably due to spammers located on my server. Really sucks.