Homeland Security’s Domain Name Seizure May Stretch The Law Past The Breaking Point

“We had a bunch of questions concerning the legality of Homeland
Security’s seizure of domain names via its Immigration &
Customs Enforcement (ICE) group. The whole thing seemed of
extremely dubious legality. And it appears we’re not the only ones
to think so.

“First, it’s important to understand exactly what happened.
Copycense points us to a useful analysis of how the seizures
actually worked. Amazingly, it appears that Homeland Security
contracted out the seizures to a private company, immixGroup IT
Solutions, which set up the “seizedservers.com” domain that the
seized domains now point to. The other bit of useful info is that
the seizures appear to have been done directly by VeriSign at the
top level domain level. VeriSign, of course, controls the .com TLD,
and so Homeland Security appears to have just asked VeriSign to
move the domains (with a court order, of course), and it did
so.”

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