ICE Seizes Over 1 Million Websites With No Due Process; Apparently Unaware That Copyright & Trademark Are Different

from the this-does-not-bode-well dept

Over the years, we've written an awful lot about asset forfeiture and how it is basically the government stealing shit they want with almost no due process. But the reason we started writing about asset forfeiture was when ICE used that process to seize a bunch of websites based entirely on the claims of the RIAA and MPAA that those websites were distributing copyright-infringing material. It turned out those claims were totally bullshit, leading to ICE eventually agreeing to return a blog over a year after it had been seized, and two others after holding them for over five years.

I'm still perplexed that this story was almost entirely ignored by the media. This was outright censorship by the US government -- the equivalent of seizing a printing press from a publication and holding it based on nothing other than some private party's complaints about the content of their publication. Incredibly, an ICE official, soon after the initial seizures, made the following bold claim:

"People told us that we will fail if we seize these domain names, and that we'll look foolish," said Erik Barnett, assistant deputy director of the US government's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) team, which began conducting Operation In Our Sites last year.

He also stated that none of the seized sites had challenged the seizure, which was literally false. Barnett, in case you're wondering, has moved on to the private sector and is apparently now the Regional Head of Europe for Financial Crime Threat Mitigation for HSBC, a company that was described in a recent article this way:

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