ICE Finally Admits It Totally Screwed Up

[p2p rules]

While the folks at Homeland Security refused to even admit that they had totally screwed up and seized a domain with 84,000 (mostly legal) websites last week, apparently someone at Homeland Security finally realized that the press wasn't going to keep accepting them refusing to answer questions about it. So, it's finally come clean and admitted they seized all of mooo.com, despite the vast majority of it being legal.

I would think that mooo.com's operator has an incredibly strong legal case against Homeland Security if he decides to bring it.

That said, Homeland Security's statement on the matter is pretty (unintentionally) funny in that it doesn't seem to apologize for this blatant First Amendment violation, nor the lack of due process, but does say that authorities are "reviewing" what happened to avoid future mistakes. Oh really? Here's a simple suggestion:

Try some due process.

It's pretty simple, really. If, rather than just seizing domains with absolutely no notice whatsoever, Homeland Security and the kids at ICE actually had to file a lawsuit and allow for an adversarial hearing before the domain got seized, then somewhere in the process before 84,000 voices got shut up by the US government, someone might have pointed out that most of the content on mooo.com was perfectly legal, and Homeland Security could have focused on the few users who were breaking the law. But, you know, that would involve actually obeying the law, and that seems like way too much for Homeland Security these days.

Techdirt