US government accidentally shuts down 84,000 websites during child porn raid

Approximately 84,000 websites were shut down and wrongfully accused of having links to child pornography as part of "Operation Protect Our Children," a new joint operation between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ).

The DHS Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced Tuesday that it had executed seizure warrants against ten domain names of websites engaged in the distribution of child pornography, but during the operation the domain name of a large DNS service provider was also mistakenly seized, TorrentFreak reported.

The domain name mooo.com, which belongs to the DNS provider FreeDNS, hosted 84,000 subdomains, all of which were seized and replaced with a Homeland Security Investigations banner.

"On Friday February 11th at around 9:30 PM PST mooo.com (the most popular shared domain at afraid.org) was suspended at the registrar level," the FreeDNS owner said in a statement. "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."

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/16/us-government-accidentally-shuts-down-84000-websites-during-child-porn-raid/

I'd want that law professor from Hastings in SF on my side to extract a huge, huge settlement -- and personally ruin and destroy the financial futures of the imbeciles who did this.

to shutting down the Internet. 84,000 "accidents" are a lot of "accidents".

Especially since FreeDNS was targeted - possible casualty in net neutrality, forcing us all to use the DNS (and bullshit, adware/spyware laden redirect pages when you get a 404 vs. pulling up an actual web search) of our corporate ISP.

they always have a Good Cause when they do things like this.

is not a part of the equation

I, for one, have my doubts.

They use "kiddie porn" as a stalking horse, because no sane person approves of it. But what they are really after is total internet censorship of content. Bank on it.

It only takes a few seconds.

I guess we should trust them unquestioningly. If they said it was an honest mistake then it must be so.

I goes without saying that the government has never lied to it's citizens before.