Is there any recourse for this action? Seems that this would trigger unreasonable search and seizure.
My educated guess based on experience working with people affected by dissimilar causes but similar appearance to Google: a massive hit to rankings/traffic within about 48 hours, and recovery to a fraction of normal several weeks later.
I doubt that one can easily convince a judge that loss of Google rankings is a cognizable harm under tort law, but given that an agency of the US government just called you a child pornographer on your own property, if there isn't a sovereign immunity defense you will hardly need to justify what a high ranking on Google is worth to receive damages.
I'm all for prosecuting child pornographers, and shutting down their content as quickly as possible - but that should be possible by a court order against the hosting provider.... or if said provider is unreachable / out of jurisdiction, and has STILL had some reasonable attempt at contact to press charges, then sure, go after the domain - but there needs to be some due process behind things rather than just having the federal authorities and DNS layer just whomping things down with little to no oversight.
WTF are they doing screwing around with DNS registrations in cases where they know that is taking place?
It sure seems to me like some adversarial government entity simply found a knob they can turn to screw with people when they don't actually have the standard of evidence required for a prosecution.
Well, you can thank the Patriot Act for that. It allows them to go after people without telling them until it happens.
Considering how many sites have analytics these days, being able to show a strong correlation between a big blow to your traffic and a decline in revenue would (I think, IANAL) be very good evidence. Instead of asking the judge to imagine the possible ramifications, you'd be presenting solid data whose admissibility the judge could make a quick decision about.
Oh, I think that boundary was crossed a long time ago. It's more a problem of the US government not giving two fucks about its own Constitution.
Here's the latest news on Jewel v. NSA:
> In April, the Obama administration moved to dismiss Jewel, claiming that litigation over the wiretapping program would require the government to disclose privileged "state secrets,” and that they were immune from suit.
According to the documents on the EFF site, they appealed the ruling, but there hasn't been anything posted about the results of that.
How about the case against AT&T?
> In June of 2009, a federal judge dismissed Hepting and dozens of other lawsuits against telecoms, ruling that the companies had immunity from liability under the controversial FISA Amendments Act (FISAAA), which was enacted in response to our court victories in Hepting. Signed by President Bush in 2008, the FISAAA allows the Attorney General to require the dismissal of the lawsuits over the telecoms' participation in the warrantless surveillance program if the government secretly certifies to the court that the surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president -- certification that was filed in September of 2008. EFF is planning to appeal the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, primarily arguing that FISAAA is unconstitutional in granting to the president broad discretion to block the courts from considering the core constitutional privacy claims of millions of Americans.
0: https://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying
Hardly surprising, since he voted to immunize them while in the Senate.
The bottom line is that the government has sovereign immunity, and can only be sued when it allows itself to be sued.
The so-called "Constitution-Free Zone": the Constitution allows for warrantless searches at borders for the purposes of customs enforcement. But our government has conveniently decided that the "border" is now defined as any land within 100 miles of a physical border.
Guess what? 2/3 of the American population lives within that definition of a border. Guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure died long ago.
http://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-liberty...
This trend towards outright censorship is a worrying one. While I can't speak to the content of any of the sites in this round of censorship/seizure, the DHS certainly seems to be acting outside their mandate.
Basically, the government is immune from lawsuit unless it chooses to allow you to sue it. And this is the presupposition, so they don't need to justify it.
You've got only two defenses against this: (1) The right to vote; and (2) the right to keep and bear arms.
Use your boxes, and please please please use them in that order.
There's still time to call your Senator and see if he gives a damn.