US Government Domain Seizures Failing Miserably 132
ktetch-pirate writes "Operation In Our Sites, a US Government-led domain seizure action to deal with piracy, is pretty much a failure. TorrentFreak has examined a significant number of sites that have gone on pretty much unhindered, despite the seizures. Already some questions have been asked about the constitutionality of the seizures, and the evidence used as justification, but it seems the end results weren't as good as boasted either."
The war on drugs is a failure too... so? (Score:5, Insightful)
The practice of seizure of land, cash and other assets based only on suspicion of connection with illegal drugs is still going on to this day. It is riddled with constitutional problems and yet here we are, decades later, the practice still going on.
The airport screening efforts, though more "formalized" only exposes the stupidity of the whole thing. By most definitions, a failure but it continues.
It's nice to identify things as not working, but it has to be admitted to be a failure by the people who made it happen and then stopped. It is not a failure as it represents to the public "we are doing the best we can" so that the question "why didn't you try something?" gets asked, they can point to this -- failure or not -- as an attempt to "do something."
FTP Warez Servers (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember back in the day when you had to hang out in IRC channels and share FTP warez server lists. Maybe it'll revert back to that.
Re:tl;dr (Score:1, Insightful)
The censorship in Egypt proved him wrong. They shutdown the internet to local citizens completely, just by telling the ISPs to go offline.
Re:tl;dr (Score:4, Insightful)
Government interprets freedom fighters as terrorists and shoots into them.
The missing ingredients are technology and jurisdiction.
Slashdotters and the like are providing the former; lawyers and politicians the latter.
Re:tl;dr (Score:4, Insightful)
Tor is useless if you can't even get an IP address. They were likely using dialup to other countries
Re:tl;dr (Score:4, Insightful)
The only difference between a "freedom fighter" and a "terrorist" is that a freedom fighter is on the same side as the speaker, while a terrorist is on the other side.
Similar rules apply to the difference between "torture" and "enhanced interrogation", and a host of other terms regularly used in news and politics.