Blog service shut down by order of US law enforcement
Move shrouded in secrecy
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
A blogging service with 70,000 users has been forced to permanently close its doors under orders from unidentified law enforcement officers, in a case that raises questions about free speech and due process on the internet.
Blogetery went offline on July 9, leaving some 70,000 subscribers with no way to access their blogs, according to this communique from site administrators. The website was “terminated by request of law enforcement officials, due to material hosted on the server,” according to an email sent by Burstnet.com, Blogetery's webhosting provider. Blogetery officials say the closure is permanent and users won't be able to retrieve content they stored on the service.
“Please note that this was not a typical case, in which suspension and notification would be the norm,” Burstnet officials wrote. “This was a critical matter brought to our attention by law enforcement officials. We had to immediately remove the server.”
It's at least the second mysterious closure of an online service this month. On Wednesday, IPBFree.com was also taken offline, according to this post. Administrators have been “legally precluded from discussing the exact bits of what happened” except to say the outage is permanent and isn't the result of hacker attacks or any copyright violations by its users.
“The owner had no choice in the matter,” one IPBFree representative said on Twitter. “Legal reasons forced us to close. Death threats are rather over-the-top really.”
Officials from Burstnet have yet to respond to email seeking comment on the reasons they pulled the plug on Blogetery.
The outages are highly unusual because they strand tens of thousands of users without providing them any notice or explanation. In some sense, they resemble the plight of the Internet Archive a few years ago, when the San Francisco-based digital library was secretly ordered to turn over personal information of one of its users under a tough anti-terrorism law passed following the September 11 attacks in the US. The FBI eventually withdrew the demand after it was challenged in secret court proceedings as unconstitutional.
Without knowing more about the underlying case involving Blogetery , it's impossible to say the draconian move is unjustified. Indeed, CNET is reporting that it came after FBI officials found al-Qaeda materials on Blogetery's servers that included the names of American citizens targeted for assassination and messages from Osama bin Laden and bomb-making tips.
A Burstnet official told the news outlet they terminated Blogetery's service because the materials are a violation of its terms of service. ®
COMMENTS
Any fascist regime would be proud of these guys.
Homeland Security nazis strike: You must disconnect the server and you may not say that we did it or else!
Any fascist regime would be proud of these guys.
Black helicopters, obviously.
Dan Goodin inviting fascism in by the back door?
"Without knowing more about the underlying case involving Blogetery , it's impossible to say the draconian move is unjustified."
With all do respect (which after the above statement, may not be very much), this statement is complete and utter crap. 70,000 users, many, if not the majority of them, U.S. citizens (and thus due the full and complete protection of the U.S. constitution) have had their I.P. confiscated* and their right to free speech at least impinged upon. There is NO situation in which the innocent users of this service should not be allowed to get their data back. Personally, I care not one wit if this operation is directly related to preventing a terrorist attack in my home town - law enforcement should be able to do it without walking over 70,000 innocents.
-d
* Yes, everyone should make backups of anything they really care about and put up on an online web service, but that really is not the point - this was not accidental data lass, this was deliberate.
You will notice
at 5am one morning when the police kick your door in for something you know nothing about, because nobody noticed or gave even a small amount of poop.
Quoting Pastor Niemöller here would be superfluous.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
