Communications of the ACM
Gov't Crackdown Spurs Initiatives to Route Around Dns
Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the principal investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led an alphabet soup of government agencies in seizing the domain names of 82 Web sites that ICE said were "engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works" (See: Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0). The seizures were accomplished by getting the VeriSign registry, owner of the .com and .net top-level domains, to change the authoritative domain-name servers for the seized domains to servers controlled by DHS.
Regardless of the supposed criminal intent of the affected systems, the seizure without notice of these domain names by US authorities sent shock-waves around the Internet world. It got people's attention in a much stronger way than version 1 of this enforcement operation had—the first iteration late last June seized the names of nine sites selling pirated first-run movies. Many people woke up to the reality of how vulnerable the DNS is to government meddling.
(More recently, the uproar caused by the WikiLeaks publication of U.S. diplomatic cables—and subsequent attempts to censor the site and/or to hound it off the Internet—have resulted in what developer Dave Winer calls "a human DNS" implemented "in a weird sneaker-net sort of way," via Twitter and ad hoc bulletin-board sites.)
From ITworld
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