Often curmudgeonly but always passionate defender of free speech and government transparency, New York architect John Young publishes a whistleblower document publishing archive called Cryptome.org

His latest domain name registrar and web hosting company , the giant Network Solutions has censored the entire site by removing the cryptome.org and cryptome.com domain names from their DNS, and placing the domain under a "Legal Lock", after having been served with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice, alleging copyright infringement of a Microsoft document.

Domain ID:D7496146-LROR

Domain Name:CRYPTOME.ORG

Created On:25-Jun-1999 14:58:29 UTC

Last Updated On:24-Feb-2010 18:47:18 UTC

Expiration Date:25-Jun-2011 14:58:29 UTC

Sponsoring Registrar:Network Solutions LLC (R63-LROR)

Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED

Status:CLIENT HOLD

Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED

Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED

There is no excuse for censoring thousands of other web pages, from a major website, simply because there is a civil legal dispute (this is not a criminal matter) regarding one of them.

You can read the full story and other cryptome.org content via

http://cryptome.org.uk /

which currently points to

http://cryptomeorg.siteprotect.net/

This sort of censorship, without any fair trial in Court, is exactly the sort of thing we have to fear from disgraced, unelected, Labour Cabinet Minister Peter Mandelson's wretched Digital Economy Bill - see the Open Rights Group for the latest news on this.



UPDATE:

We are happy to report that the censorship of Cryptome.org has ended, after less than 24 hours.

The disputed document is again available:

http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/microsoft-spy.zip Microsoft Global Criminal Spy Guide February 20, 2010 (1.6MB)



This probably now out of date document (circa 2008) is full of strange concepts for United Kingdom "Communications Service Providers" with mention of Subpoenas or Warrants signed by Judges etc.

None of these apply here in the UK where such Communications Traffic Data is automatically requested via the "Single Point of Contact" using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and Data Protection Act 2000 section 29 requests

Such requests / demands are self authorised in secret by the hundreds of government organisations with the power to do so.

We suspect that Microsoft and other US based ISPs would be horrified by the European Union and United Kingdom governments' mandatory Data Retention laws, which require data log file retention for a year.

There is a confirmatory nugget of information in the document:

4. In Site IP/Time/History Row

a. The Site IP/Time/History table is not updated if the user logs in again from the SAME IP address to the SAME Microsoft

site. It only shows the FIRST login of the LAST day for the user, from the same IP and to the same machine.

b. There are many cases where end user IP address is hidden by ISP proxy server. SIS shows the IP address of ISP proxy server, instead of real end user IP address. So for the individual user information you can approach the ISP.

c. The table is limited to only the last 10 MS SITE and IP combinations.



You do know about the Tor onion routing proxy server cloud, don't you ?

Will anyone now "leak" the equivalent policy document for Network Solutions ?