To me it dosen’t make any sense at all.

I highly doubt they were taken down due to terrorist activity – if that was the case it seems to me that they would leave them up so they have a source of information to actually catch the terrorists.

If they were taken down due to copyright infringement then that is plan wrong – copyright infringement is a CIVIL offense in the US – not a CRIMINAL one and law enforcement shouldn’t be involved AT ALL.

IPBfree just shut down all their forums under the same “gag order” circumstances. I have also been thinking “Homeland Security”, but I’ve been unable to post my comment anywhere – perhaps because I used some forbidden word when discussing it. I will attempt to post my comment here. I really hope someone researching the subject will see it.

Here is what I’ve been attempting to post in regard to IPBfree:

Some people have pointed out that the government has been on the move against DMCA offenders, and Blogetery also seemed to be under some gag order when they were shut down: http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-shut-down-wordpress-host-with-73000-blogs-100716/

I’m still skeptical that DMCA problems would cause such abrupt, drastic action – which could lead to loss and damages claims from those who weren’t involved in any misdeeds. It seems more likely that the servers must have been involved in some sort of criminal activity that had to be caught by surprise and stopped on the spot – like pornography, massive spamming, virus distribution, gambling, or snuff films. In the US, though, there is one particular category of criminal activity that is likely to draw swift action and utter disregard for anyone’s property or civil rights: terrorism.

By chance, I was reading today about the Connecticut Four. A couple of years ago the FBI sent letters to libraries, demanding patron records without any sort of court order. While libraries have been a bastion of defending privacy and free speech in the US, the Connecticut Four were the first to fight back: http://www.aclu.org/national-security/librarians-speak-out-first-time-after-being-gagged-patriot-act

The salient issue is that the librarians were gagged during the entire case. This meant they could not bring up what the FBI was doing or offer an opinion while the US Congress was discussing renewal of the Patriot Act. The FBI told Congress no such letters were being set, and the Patriot Act was renewed.

Librarians were the first to recognize that this was the slippery slope to dismantling some of the most important civil rights in the US. I’m wondering whether these sudden server shutdowns are an extension of this…some hint of terrorism permitting the utter disregard of anyone else’s civil rights. Even if the forums were “free” and only existed at the discretion of ipbfree, there was certainly no expectation of the forums suddenly vanishing. It seems to me there are abundant legal arguments about implied contracts, creative work product, and free speech that would come to bear…unless the US government had a catch-all rights-abrogation pretext like terrorism.

On the bright side, perhaps by hitting so many people’s creative endeavors and writings at once, people will finally realize that the destruction of civil rights inherent in the Patriot Act and other recent legislation affects *all of us*. People need to start fighting back before every last shred of our rights is taken away.

binthere222 – check out the link to the Connecticut Four I posted above. The FBI security letters require no Court Order. That’s why the Librarians attempted to stand up to them.

Unfortunately because they were gagged during the whole process, they couldn’t argue against the Patriot Act’s renewal. Thus, the FBI can still “shut down” just about anything without a court order and without further explanation.

Yes, it’s astounding the US let that happen. Thank goodness for the library case, because otherwise these server cases would be assumed to be some trivial DMCA matter and no one would even stop to consider whether this is a symptom of a larger destruction of human rights. In these cases the work and property of many, many innocent bystanders was destroyed. Surely this will bring the issue to public notice at last.

I’m disappointed that the main stream media hasn’t even noticed yet. Tens of thousands of people have been affected.

If in fact a blog was being used for serious criminal activity AND taking down the blog would notify the criminals involved and cause them to disperse/destroy data etc. THEN it perhaps makes sense to take down the whole shebang in one blow and leave the criminals with no escape route (admittedly at the cost of free speech of individuals on the other blogs). Think SWAT teams making a raid w/ no prior warning so evidence is preserved and suspects don’t flee.

Okay, Kids, Tactics. You realize that most people in government don’t work over the weekend. They work a forty hour week. If your blog is one of those affected, or a blog you go to, you check first thing Monday morning, tomorrow morning, to see that it is still down, so you don’t wind up looking like a damm fool. If it’s still down, you call your congresscritter, and you tell the staffer on the phone that your blog was taken down, and the hosting company says it was on the orders of a government agency, and they won’t say what government agency. That’s all you say about the takedown, you don’t talk about Joe Biden, or about Adolph Hitler, or about any of that stuff you don’t have direct knowledge of. You don’t know what the Blogetry man may have been into, any more than you know what money your banker may have embezzled. You don’t know from nothing, in fact.

Keep to what you do know about. You talk about what your blog is about and why it is important; you tell them all about your blog, over and over again, as long as they will listen; and you keep coming back to the subject of your blog, and how much trouble it has been to you that it has been shut down.

Rosa Parks didn’t start talking politics– she talked about how much her feet hurt, and how much she wanted to sit down, and no one ever thought to ask whether she had been to Highlander Folk School, the CIO’s training academy for labor organizers. The teachers at HFS had probably made her read Karl Marx, but she didn’t talk Karl Marx– she talked about her feet.