Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has long been on a controversial campaign to seize the domain names of "rogue websites" accused of trafficking in copyright and trademark infringement—but it has shown little interest in going after people who believe that vaccines cause autism.

Which is why it was such a surprise to learn that lowellsfacts.com—an almost unknown site with an eye-assaulting Web design straight out of the mid-'90s—is now showing the ICE takedown banner.

The operator of the site, Lowell Hubbs, took to one of his blogs to ramble about why his site had been seized by the feds. Apparently, he was hacked by someone who deposited 70GB of pornographic material on his server. (We were unable to get in touch with Hubbs.)

"The website is apparently full (as I have been told), of porn links that were hacked into it," wrote Hubbs. "By what it states by the authorities on the pages. Apparently, as I was told; there are links or hidden links hacked into my site that go to illegal porn and as well likely music down loads or movies, or links to counterfeit something. I don't know what is in there personally, nor how they did it, and I don't know yet all of what is going on; I am just getting beginning information, by someone who has looked into it and is more knowledgeable than I am to computer systems."

Hubbs issued a later update in which he (sort of?) clarified the situation:

Well, guess what, it has now been found all of it right there in the upload page, what was put into the site. In fact they clearly got in through the website tonight log in which I never use, as I use the Godaddy log in, and never had written down the website tonight log in. So, quite obviously I never put that in there as I never even had the website tonight log in ever written down nor recorded. When I changed passwords many times, I only changed the Godaddy account password, never realizing what I had overlooked. Apparently there were 17 pages that had an unknown link somewhere that accessed the files of what was fraudulently placed in my site; unknown to me. It has all since been removed. Even though the gov't agencies apparently have file copy of all that was there and what was there, at least now I know what happened. Apparently what was there was a very large file, judging by the space that it took, about 70GB. And how in the hell would I have acquired anything like that? For anyone to believe I am responsible for that, I can tell you-you are flat out-insane! Anyone with any common sense looking at this picture, would know the chance of that is zero! Period. Nice try though, just one more attempt to falsely destroy me, and a huge one. There is nothing these people will stop at in attempting to do so. To much truth.

He then put his site up under a different domain name.

Sites like TorrentFreak covered the story, asking questions about ICE's behavior. "So why has ICE seized the domain and put up the copyright notice? If we had some due process, some proper hearings which allow the facts to come out into the open and disputed or confirmed, any claims of copyright infringement could be assessed. As usual the public is in the dark."

While we share many of these concerns about the current, non-adversarial seizure process, ICE isn't the bad guy here. In fact, ICE hasn't seized the domain at all.

I asked ICE for the affidavit behind the seizure and received a polite call from a baffled-sounding press officer. He knew nothing about the seizure. After looking into it further, he sent along a statement:

"ICE has not taken any enforcement action against this site. The site owner/administration redirected www.lowellsfacts.com to our name server, where the seizure banner is hosted."

We've entered a new world, apparently: the ICE seizure banner as prank.

It's hard to say definitely what happened here, but it sounds a lot like someone disgusted by Hubbs' anti-vaccine activism and paranoia hacked into his site, perhaps uploaded some porn just for fun, then pointed the site's DNS record toward the ICE takedown banner. A classic troll.

The whole story reminds us that the presence of an ICE banner on a site means nothing; because the banner simply exists at a specific IP address, any site can be made to look like the victim of a "seizure" simply by redirecting its DNS records. Start prepping for April 1 now.