Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said Friday he would demand answers from the Department of Homeland Security about its domain seizure program known as Operation in Our Sites after it was revealed that the government kept a hip-hop music review site’s name for a year without affording the owner a chance to challenge the seizure.

Wyden also wants to know why there was no court record of the case, other than the initial seizure filing a year ago.

"I expect the administration will be receiving a series of FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests from our office and that the senator will have very pointed questions with regard to how the administration chooses to target the sites that it does," said Jennifer Hoelzer, a Wyden spokeswoman. She said the senator was "particularly interested in learning how many secret dockets exist for copyright cases. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious precedent or explanation for that."

Wyden’s interest comes a day after federal authorities returned the domain name dajaz1.com, which was back online greeting visitors Friday with a powerful message about proposed web-censorship legislation that expands the government—and copyright holders—power to shutter and cripple sites suspected of copyright infringement.

The federal government already has the power to seize web domains under the same forfeiture laws used to seize property like houses, cars and boats allegedly tied to illegal activity such as drug running. A year ago, it started invoking that law against sites marketing and trafficking in counterfeit goods, unauthorized sports streaming and unauthorized music—seizing more than 350 domain names in all.

One of the sites caught in that crackdown (PDF) was dajaz1.com. Operation in Our Sites, run by the Department of Homeland Security, accused the site of allowing its users to download prerelease music. But as it turns out, some of that music was sent to the popular blog by the artists or labels.

The site’s homepage on Friday was dominated by a video pointing to alarming legislation known as the Protect IP Act—which is stalled in a procedural muck—that a Senate committee passed months ago basically giving copyright owners the right to shutter websites believed to be dedicated to infringing activities. Judicial oversight is not needed. In a recent editorial, we spoke about such dangers that this and a similar proposed House measure are ripe for abuse. After all, if the movie industry had its way, the VCR would have been outlawed.

Techdirt disclosed Thursday that for a year, the government refused to allow the site’s owner, who goes by the moniker Splash, to challenge the November 2010 seizure of the domain name by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, which is a branch of DHS. The only publicly available court record regarding the seizure was the initial filing of a court order a year ago. Everything else was sealed—invisible to Splash, his lawyer, the public and the press. On Thursday, the site was returned to the owner of the Queens, New York-based site with the only explanation being that forfeiture was unwarranted.

ICE’s complaint against the site listed four songs that the site allegedly linked to in violation of copyright law. Three of them were e-mailed to Splash by record executives associated with labels that belong to the Recording Industry Association of America, which helped create the complaint.

"It’s not my fault if someone at a record label is sending me the song," Splash told The New York Times last year.