Secret Surveillance And Safety In The U.S.A.

With the leaked documents from ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirming what many had feared for years it seemed a crossroads had been met by the populace of the nation. Here is the text of the Fourth Amendment from the constitution of the United States:

Gen. Alexander has tried to explain the necessity of and oversight applied to these programs, which is admirable. If the NSA's record is as spotless as Gen. Alexander has claimed, then we owe him a debt of gratitude. Even in this case, however, we are treading dangerous water. By tacitly allowing these programs to continue on, we are leaving a legacy for future generations to institute a more rigid police state, without the oversights Gen. Alexander is so proud of.

One interesting thing I discovered after the Guardian broke the leak about XKeyscore, NSA's program of omni-scale email data mining. Here's a press release (July 30th) from NSA about the program. They mostly want to reassure the public analysts are not randomly accessing their data (which they could), and that the leaks are detrimental to national security. Strangely, if you do a Google search for "xkeyscore engineer" you'll get oodles of results for XKeyscore engineer jobs through various defense contractors. If it's searchable on the web, how secret was it really?

Image used from The Verge (theverge.com) without attribution.

 Thought this was funny, so I made it.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Taking Down Websites

On November 26th, 2010, owners of sites such as torrent-finder.com were greeted with the following graphic. These notices serve as first contact between ICE-DHS and the site owners.

In the past week or so a number of internet sites associated with the pirating of music have been taken down by ICE - Homeland Security Investigations. The most recent example is www.torrent-finder.com. The news site torrentfreak carries some of the basic information to this story.

The long and short of it is ICE - DHS have redirected the site's nameservers without the registrar's knowledge or consent. The site owner also received little to no warning of the takedown.

Many other sites have been taken down in this manner recently, including 2009jerseys.com. A whois search through internic.com reveals the torrent-finder.com sites nameservers have been redirected to NS1 and NS2.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM.

Looking into the owners of seizedservers.com reveals the site to have been registered and created originally on November 24^th of this year. The owners of the site are immixGroup IT Solutions. immixGroup provide internet technology products to public sector clients.

Interestingly, but ultimately uninteresting, is that seizedservers.com are serving up the ICE takedown notice image which is displayed at the top of this post. They are also using Google analytics and open source #piwik for additional analytics on site visitors.

I have contacted ICE and they have provided me with on-the-record confirmation that they have seized these domain names. You can see a copy of the email here

. I will also be seeking comment from immixGroup regarding the use of analytics on a takedown site.

UPDATE: I originally read of this here at Torrent Freaks. They have updated the list of seized domains and it appears that most of these sites are indeed involved with selling counterfeit goods.

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