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Feds seize conspiracy theorist’s domain
Kevin Murphy,
June 7, 2011, 09:04:10 (UTC),
Domain Policy
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has seized the domain name of an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist.
Update: This story is probably bogus.
The domain lowellsfacts.com has started resolving to the now-familiar ICE banner, warning visitors about the penalties for counterfeiting and copyright infringement.
Its name servers switched this week to ICE-owned seizedservers.com.
Judging from the Google cache, the site was devoted to spreading dangerous misinformation about the the efficacy of various vaccines, particularly Gardasil, which is used to prevent HPV infection.
Unlike previously seized domains, lowellsfacts.com does not, at least from the cache, appear to have been prominently pimping counterfeit goods.
It was registered using Go Daddy’s private registration service, but once belonged to one Lowell Hubbs.
You can listen to Hubbs’ theory about vaccines and the Rockerfellers on YouTube. He makes Jenny McCarthy look sensible. He was apparently a regular Huffington Post commenter.
A blog devoted to criticizing Hubbs and his theories can be found at lowellhubbs.blogspot.com and the reply to that blog, purportedly written by Hubbs, can be found, confusingly, at costnermatthews.blogspot.com.
The Hubbs’ blog claims the seized site had been hacked and filled with illegal porn links. His critic’s blog says he was likely shut down for using copyrighted material without permission.
Another GoDaddy name gets seized. Hmmm…
I’m not sure it matters which registrar was used. ICE usually goes directly to VeriSign when it wants a .com seized.
Freedom of speech is out the window when this kind of stuff happens. It’s a slippery slope.
If he was targeted for his views, regardless of the pretext for the takedown, I would think that this would qualify as an abuse of his 1st Amendment rights. Hello, ACLU? Hello?
Yeah it’s getting rather scary and it won’t be the last for sure and prolly get worse.
It isn’t about freedom of speech (Mr. Hubbs has another website with all of the same information) but it sounds like it has to do with some ties to kiddie porn.
This is an elaborate hoax. Check the whois information on every seized site so far and you’ll find the following status tags: serverDeleteProhibited, serverTransferProhibited, serverUpdateProhibited. Those aren’t present on his domain name.
You may be right, but I did see some on the Gov list of seized servers that don’t show those messages. May be updating or something or the Domains by Proxy privatization?
It’s funny how he now has a new domain and everything pointing to what seems like his old site at (vacfacts.info). Wouldn’t that be pulled down too? One would also think that when “or IF” he contacted GoDaddy, that they would have assisted if it was a hoax by getting it removed? I guise only the lowellsfacts.com editor can explain if he was pranked or really in trouble. I’m sure we’ll find out soon…
The blog about ” or I should say against” him looks to be interesting though, lol.
I had attorneys working on it after it was understood what had gone on, and it is as it explains on my blog, that is what happened. costnermatthews.blogspot.com. I had also contact with the website provider to get the domain back in working order.
The domain and the site have been returned to me today and it is back online redirected to a new domain set up before it was known the site would be back up. At the time I expected it never would be. Considering what obviously had been hacked into the upload files I don’t see that the gov’t had any other choice but to shut the site down until an investigation was done.
This conclusively proves I was not guilty of anything alleged nor claimed.
[…] Feds seize conspiracy theorist’s domain […]
[…] seems I may have jumped the gun. The seizure of lowellsfacts.com almost certainly didn’t […]