The number of wired individuals nowadays has been increasing daily and majority of the people are relying mostly on the internet for their daily activities. "If you can have it online, why bother to go out?" – it has been there most popular statement. Sports enthusiasts are also resorting to online live streams of their favorite major sport events if they can't make it live to the venue.
Sounds very high end and convenient but these sites are using copyrighted sporting events. According to the law of many countries, it is illegal. That's why, the US government has taken action and just seized ten (10) of the most popular sports streaming websites. According to the US government's complaint, each of the seized sites aggregated illegal, pirated broadcasts, and provided links to site visitors. That is fine with me. The most thing which annoys me is when a government blocks a website because it is being used by people to express their views or campaign against the government malpractices. We saw this in Tunisia and Egypt.
Now let me go to your main question on how website are seized by government. A visit to the blacklisted websites like
This domain name has been seized by ICE - Homeland Security Investigations now results in the ominous looking message from the US Homeland Security. While the graphic is pretty scary, Market Ticker's Karl Denninger points out the websites themselves and the servers they run on have not actually been seized, just the domains.
He says: "That's a lot of staff attorney time and trouble to get a big fat nothing out of it, which is exactly what they get going down this road. Why? Because all they can do is redirect the domain pointers which will do exactly nothing when the sites re-register under a top-level domain not under the US Government's jurisdiction – and there are lots of them."
Domains under US jurisdiction currently include anything controlled by Verisign which puts .com site owners in a legal relationship with the United States. According to Denninger, all afflicted site owners need to do is move to a non-US controlled top level domain in order to dodge further ICE seizures. Some have already started to migrate to other domains, though it's likely choices like .net won't be any safer. Torrent-Finder owner Waleed Gad El Kareem said he switched his site over to Torrent-Finder.info the moment he saw the ICE message on Torrent-Finder.com, posting the new site's address on Twitter. However, most focus is on websites that are claimed to violate copyrights.
How about other website such as facebook, twitter or YouTube?. These cannot be seized by a government except may be the US government. However, they can be blocked by government to be accessible in their jurisdictions. Some authorities often block specific websites and blogs considered critical of their regime. For exzample, the governmnet of Swazland has blocked
pudemo.org - Home which is the website of the People's United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), a political movement committed to the creation, protection and promotion of a constitutional multi-party democracy, a transparent and accountable government, an environment conducive to the economic growth and empowerment and the development of a culturally vibrant and tolerant society, based on maximum participation and the respect of the will of the people.
If they cannot block a site, they can setup a massive 'community management' team to do some police on the site, to monitor conversations, filter specific pages, and block some specific functions like video uploading, etc. They can also hack or do phising attack to steal passwords.
A site can be blocked using your internet service provider (ISP). Or they can use OpenDNS, a company that provides free DNS servers rather than using the internet service provider (ISP). One feature of OpenDNS is the ability to block domains or category of domains. The second requirement to restricting website access is to use their web proxy.