It has begun. The march to implement Orwell’s 1984 continues…
73,000 blogsites have been taken off line with the snap of a finger by “the authorities”.
Authorities Force 73,000 Blogs Offline?
from the that-doesn’t-seem-right dept
TorrentFreak is reporting that a company, Blogetery, that hosted about 73,000 blogs, has been shut down by US authorities. Details are, admittedly, sketchy at this point, but the entire site has been taken down, and the company’s ISP claims that they had to terminate the account immediately due to the “request of law enforcement officials, due to material hosted on the server.” The ISP also claimed:
“this was not a typical case, in which suspension and notification would be the norm. This was a critical matter brought to our attention by law enforcement officials. We had to immediately remove the server.”
That seems odd. If there was problematic content from some users, why not just take down that content or suspend those users. Taking down all 73,000 blogs seems… excessive. TorrentFreak speculates that this may be a part of the recent Homeland Security efforts to shut down file sharing site, and points to some evidence that there were at least a few Blogetery blogs that shared copyrighted works. However, no one’s talking, and the ISP seems spooked, saying that it’s “serious”:
“Simply put: We cannot give him his data nor can we provide any other details. By stating this, most would recognize that something serious is afoot.”
I’m still wondering what could be so serious that the specific problems couldn’t be pinpointed? Taking down 73,000 blogs with no notice seems like overkill, no matter what the actual issue turns out to be.
“have you considered something like a site being used for clandestine communication between terrorists, as an example? public face to trigger attacks? you never know.”
Commenter Dark Helmet nails it.
All 73k blogs were being used by terrorists? And their action was to take them down?
Dear lord, I hope you’re wrong, otherwise we must have the most inept people working at the CIA/FBI/NSA/ONI/Etc. If even a majority of those blogs were being used by international terrorists trying to launch sophisticated and coordinated attacks on Americans (and if they are, what in the hell are they waiting for? It’s been nearly 10 years since a successful credible attack and something like 3-4 credible non-amatuerish attacks have been supposedly attempted and failed during that time), you USE those sites to gain intel on the enemy, not shut them down.
No, this action smacks of the government not really caring about pursuing most of the people involved in the websites, just shutting them down. And that isn’t what you do to terrorists, it’s what you do to dissidents…
Hat tip Noisy Room who originally brought this to my attention with the post First they came for the bloggers.
Are there any big names that we would recognize? Just curious.
There’s been a complete black out of info on this — we do not know anything more than what’s been published. But we’re keeping our antennae up and radar on.
Is this just a “test” to see how much they can get away with? Is it the start of using “copyright” as an excuse to shut down anything down?
If these terrorists are smart enough to communicate like this, don’t you think they have duplicate sites set up? dahhhhh.
Joe Biden at “work”.
Well, this is certainly worth keeping our eyes on. It could also mean they have gleamed enough information from these bloggers and now they are going to try and disrupt there communication.
I found a report on this in the Dept. Of Homeland security daily open source infrastructure report. There is a link to that and to the article they referenced, on my blog post here.