Secret Service and Domain Site Seizures

Hi there..,

To begin with i run multiple online sites, some are right out there on the weird and fringe side of the internet and and some are there for my own pleasure to practice code implementation among other things. I guess at my age you kinda get bored easily and want to challenge yourself beyond what the average person would do.

As you can understand some of the sites require registration and others are open or in some form require inputting data for them to be activated, in short, data mining. This is were it goes to hell.

At around the 14th i seen some really weird behavior going on, in and around the sites, a friend rang me regarding my domains and asking various but not direct questions. Now given that i travel alot, i mean alot i was kinda in a time zone that was not local and thus my mind and body simply wanted to rest. Without giving it any thought i simply told him what i wanted to say and went to bed. Several hours later, my cell begun receiving about 15-20 sms every 30mins regarding sites going off line and data disruption. Well you can imagine what happened to me at that second. So sure enough i logged into the main server and seen that it was up and running but somehow main parts of site that require activation went off line, gone, knocked off. I though oh great, here we are, someone had a field trip in the server.

About 10mins into looking at each network i seen an email that had been sent but did not see it because i was simply asleep. Now begins the journey into my title.

Secret Service and Domain Site Seizures

As cerbral i found out that one of my providers for basic js functions had been seized by the secret service without any pre-warning what so ever, i guess this is why they are referred to as the secret service. So without any more delays, you can begin reading the dilemma that i felt and thousands of others like me had to endure while they straightened things out.

Late on February 15, JotForm lost access to jotform.com. The company soon discovered the U.S. government had seized the domain by lodging a request with the site’s domain registrar GoDaddy. Soon after, it had been taken down.

Aytekin Tank, co-founder of Interlogy Internet Technologies, and owner of JotForm, later confirmed that he’d been in contact with the agent assigned to his case at the Secret Service. She was busy and couldn’t look at the site for a few days. So millions of web forms and thousands of customers were left without a service and no reason as to why this had happened.

Jump to today, and it looks as though jotform.com has been released. It is slowly coming back online and users can gain access to their forms again. Either the Secret Service agent found some time and cleared the site, or the growing interest online as to why this had happened forced someone to make the JotForm case a priority.

So what did happen? We have no idea, and neither does JotForm. The Secret Service is refusing to say why the domain was seized. All they will say is that the process they used to seize it will be reviewed to make sure correct protocol was followed. In other words, JotForm will never know what happened, and it could happen to them again, or any other site for that matter without any warning.

www.forbes.com...

www.techdirt.com...

arstechnica.com...

www.wired.com...

news.cnet.com...

www.geek.com...

thenextweb.com...

So people do take care as the world or should i say the cyber world is slowly evolving into a cannibal cyber world.

This is frightening, but no more so than the various other cyber scares we've witnessed over the past couple of months.

Great thread. s&f

It sounds like they were used as a test case, and it should be a fail with this reaching everyone's ears, and huge public outcry.

This is the thing that is failing to happen. Where is the huge public outcry?????

My business relies heavily on the web to stay afloat. 100% of our advertising is web based. In my industry print ads are a waste of time. It is all about people finding us on the web.

Lately due to posts like this I am feeling insecure. What if the internet police do not like my opinions? What if they feel I am not paying enough taxes? What if I get sued? Will the internet police shut my site down until I can get the person paid out? What if I posted something on this site the did not like? Will they shut down my ability to make money?

It amazes and scare the hell out of me to think I can be shut down with no charges files or accusation leveled. I hope to hell that JotNotes finds a way to sue the Government for the loss of business and reputation. Probably won't happen.

The police state grows stronger by the day.

I really haven't found a way around this other than taking the whole network online and having an auxiliary cloud system on a yearly plan along with a domain. Most of the forms have now been downloaded and uploaded to the new network. Obviously the only thing showing is a panic button jpg image and thats all. Behind that url lies the network ready to be deployed along with a plain blog that informs ppl in the event of a catastrophic failure this button is your network node. Other than that, we are simply at the mercy of ........