Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 12:24:18 -0400 From: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor) Subject: More: Kirkland, WA Police Threaten Declan McCullagh's Politech To: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor)
Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 00:35:28 -0400 From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: politech@politechbot.com Subject: FC: Hackers apparently nab justicefiles.org and repost police SSNs News-Site: http://www.wired.com/ URL: http://www.mccullagh.org/ URL: Politech is at http://www.politechbot.com/Author: Declan McCullagh is at http://www.mccullagh.org/ News-Site: Cluebot is at http://www.cluebot.com/
Last week, Judge Robert H. Alsdorf ordered justicefiles.org to delete Social Security numbers of police officers from its web site. (The case, as you probably recall, was brought by the city of Kirkland, Washington, and my Politech article about the ruling is what drew legal threats from their lawyers this week.)
But now the SSNs for Kirkland and other police officers are back online at justicefiles.org: http://www.justicefiles.org/Kirkland/Kirkland%20SSN.asp
Details are still sketchy, but a reliable source tells me that it wasn't intentional. The story goes like this, according to the source: Bill Sheehan, publisher of justicefiles.org, was approached by someone claiming to be affiliated with hackers-for-hire.com. Hackers-for-hire.com is based in Toronto, Canada. They offered a cheap web hosting deal, and Bill took it. But once the site was up -- and, crucially, the domain name switched over -- to their server, Bill got locked out and the SSNs reappeared. Now the SSNs are online in arguable violation of the court order, and Bill wants everyone to know that he can't take them down even if he wanted to, and he does. Bill is trying to change the DNS to point to a legal version of the site, and has contacted Domain Bank, but DNS changes take some time to propagate
My command-line whois query shows that the record was updated Thursday, and justicefiles.org has three DNS servers listed: NS1.GRANITECANYON.COM, DNS.ZENCOR.ORG, and DNS-1.EXTREME-FREAK-SHOW.COM.
Oddly, a query of Network Solution's whois database shows their record was updated Friday, and includes just two servers: DEMOS.JUSTICEFILES.ORG and NS1.JUSTICEFILES.ORG. Those appear to be inside the network of eli.net, a Washington state firm. See for yourself: http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois?STRING=justicefiles.org
Translation: The SSNs are back and may remain there for up to 24 hours while activists gleefuly mirror the content -- nless Bill can persuade a bunch of Toronto hackers that they should take a U.S. judge's order seriously. Fat chance.
Also, I wanted to thank everyone who emailed support for my own legal battle with Kirkland. It's heartening to know that there are so many people who care about free speech, though we should all be doing something else on a Friday night. :)
-Declan
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