<story><title>Members of Congress Demand Answers for the Unjust Domain Name Seizures</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/members-congress-demand-answers-homeland-securitys-unjust-domain-name-seizures</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>It used to be that if you wanted to corrupt your government so that you could gain a business advantage, it took a while. You met some politicians, you made some donations, you &quot;entertained&quot; folks. Legislation was introduced. It might take several tries before it was passed.&lt;p&gt;What I see now is that the system has granted itself so much &lt;i&gt;administrative&lt;/i&gt; discretion that you can use government as a direct agent in trying to kill your competitors. The threshold for getting the big stick of the government out and whacking your competition is so low that you&apos;re presented with multiple choices: go for their domain name. Find a violation of the thousands of various codes they must comply with. Use your patents to start a patent war. And so on.&lt;p&gt;The beauty of this way of doing things is that the more you either screw somebody else over or get screwed over, the more you end up doing all the corruption activity that you used to have to do on the front end -- but this time it&apos;s to be left alone. So in this case we have people pleading with their Congressmen to try to get the system to work correctly. We&apos;ve switched from corrupting a somewhat honest system for your own purposes to paying off a somewhat corrupt system in order to be left alone. Based on this, I predict political campaigns will continue to draw exponentially more money as things progress.&lt;p&gt;Interesting times to live in. We obviously need a secure, private, P2P domain name system.</text></comment>
<story><title>Members of Congress Demand Answers for the Unjust Domain Name Seizures</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/members-congress-demand-answers-homeland-securitys-unjust-domain-name-seizures</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jballanc</author><text>There&apos;s a well known technique used by cops (relayed to me by a handful of retired NYC cops that worked security at a former job): you let the small time offenders go, so that they are more willing to help you with the big problems down the line.&lt;p&gt;One cop explained it like this: &quot;We&apos;d find guys smoking dope on their stoop, say hello, and just keep walking,&quot; he told me. &quot;But we&apos;d remember their names and faces. Then, when there was a murder or rape in the neighborhood, we would drive around, pick them up, and say &apos;Remember when you were smoking dope and we didn&apos;t say anything? Well, now we need you to repay the favor. Give me some names...&apos;&quot;&lt;p&gt;In one sense, it was a way to coerce inside intelligence contacts. In another sense, it was cops recognizing that in a city like NYC, there are bigger problems than someone smoking pot on their doorstep.&lt;p&gt;Now the internet is the city, and these cops are arresting every jaywalker and litterer they can find. Somehow, I doubt it will turn out well in the long run...</text></comment>