<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>antidoh</author><text>Article says the material was legal, and that the govt was delaying while it waited on the &lt;i&gt;RIAA&lt;/i&gt; to conclude its investigation.&lt;p&gt;A proper investigation &lt;i&gt;prior to seizure&lt;/i&gt; would have uncovered this, and a self-respecting prosecutor or investigator would not have gone forward with seizure after learning that there was no violation.&lt;p&gt;This is what due process is for, to prevent injustices resulting from vigilantism, whether by citizens or governments.&lt;p&gt;This kind of thing makes us look like a banana republic. How fortunate that we don&apos;t have to send troops outside the country to prop ourselves up; we&apos;re already here.</text></comment>