The 83,990 sites that weren’t hosting underage porn were stuck with a the gigantic graphic seen here for days after the error was realised. Not exactly a trivial accusation – and an extremely damaging one for the sites, which were mostly personal and small business pages. FreeDNS – the domain service behind the affected sites – was forced to comply with the takedown request by court order, but was clearly (and rightfully) pissed at the misuse of their system: “freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type of abuse,” they commented. At the moment, nobody has any idea how the tremendous screwup happened.
Surely, DoJ and DHS must be a little red in the face over the whole thing. Right? Right…? Nope. In a beaming statement released yesterday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano heroically explained that “Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released on the internet. DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from further victimisation.”
Which is great, really. Child pornography is vile, and the people responsible for it are the absolute scum of the internet. But by allowing the government to wield an online sledgehammer to protect kids, we need to be sure the person holding it isn’t completely inept, and that the process whereby sites are smashed is a transparent one. When something goes wrong – especially this wrong – we need to know how it happened. It needs to, at the very least, be acknowledged. Child porn is horrible and damaging. Yes. But so is wrongfully accusing 84,000 people of having a hand in it. [TorrentFreak]
glennc
Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 10:13 AMno hope when the enforcers are idiots
Nodeity
Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 11:47 AMI’m sorry but I really believe that the US is heading down the path to a police state! This sort of thing is just the tip of the iceberg,.. “Stop loss”, the illegal invasion of “Iraq” and the abhorrent “press gang” style recruiting of kids from the poorest and least educated areas. Not to mention the abysmal state of their health system, and the amount of money spent on the military… I just hope they can pull it back together before it’s too late..!!
Ducky
Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 11:51 AMGuess we can expect these kind of screw-ups in Australia when the government’s internet filter gets turned on.
Barrie
Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 12:37 PMHell Gizmodo, keep us up to date on this one. The agency concerned should be made accountable at least. Plain incompetence. Bulldozer mentality.