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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

What are people's thoughts on the hosting company pulling the site so quickly at the request of the FBI?

Would they legally be required to? IANAL but I can't think of any reason.

I suspect they were not legally obligated to take it down (without a court order or a National Security Letter, anyway). But they also, of course, had no obligation to keep it up. I'd probably take it down if I worked there.

And if had my servers hosted there, I might consider moving them.

Why? This isn't the hosting company's fault.

Don't you think the FBI is going to be looking through his website? I wouldn't be surprised if they poked around in other servers while they were at it.

I think, for the most part, free speech is a right people expect to keep after they're dead. If you say something, the government isn't allowed to censor it, even when you're no longer around to stop them. I would want a host that would support that ideal.

Ah, I thought that someone was suggesting changing hosting companies because the host was also used by Stack, not because the host took his page down.

I would also want a host to keep sites online for as long as they'd been paid for.

It seems quite obvious he wasn't going to be paying his hosting bill anymore.

I certainly can't say I know the law in this respect. His rant did include the names of a few people which could possibly be bad for them, but it's too late now - it was posted online, cached by lots of spiders, copied by lots of people... Pulling it down now doesn't seem like it'd much matter.

cnn even has a copy posted on their site.

Taking it down anyways does, however, show that they explicitly disagree that the information should be published for the reasons you state.

They have a link to the copy at the Smoking Gun, right where it's down; I'd say this was a question of keeping the FBI happy without actually impeding the flow of information.

It was pulled even before the FBI request. The original pull text said something along the lines of "This page has been removed in light of the events in Texas earlier today". Later it was changed to mention the FBI request and gave the link to the smoking gun mirror.

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