US Government arbitrarily seizes websites related to Palestine, Iran and Yemen

49 points·geogra4··6 comments

http://www.presstv.com

https://almasirah.net

https://alalamtv.net

https://paltoday.tv

How is this possible? How can this be worked around?

.com and .net are US top-level domains and the whole domain system is controlled by ICANN which is located in the US and thus under US law.

In principle you can take a more local name server (or just /etc/hosts) and point the name presstv.com to its original ip-address. Or use a TLD (like .se) which are not under direct US control.

Politics wise. It is an unconstructive move by the US administration though, will not be to the US's longterm benifits.

Has this happened before (to websites primarily of concern to those not in the US)? The internet has been forking for a while, and I suppose eventually we will have national internets subject to border controls like other forms of commerce, but I am surprised to see the US encouraging it.

It happens regularly - though going after presstv is more aggressive than usual.

The CA certificate for the seized domain is Amazon and the domain is now hosted on Amazon. Presumably Amazon has an agreement with the FBI to support such cases.

This is an example of why and how TLS does not authenticate the actual owner of the website - unless you are implementing certificate pinning or another technique - to prevent interception.

Workaround:

registering domain and hosting site content outside of US gov or US gov-friendly jurisdictions.

Arbitrary? A judge signed off on this.

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