Phase III – Stealth Is.

The shutdowns targeted mooo.com, the most popular shared domain at free web service provider FreeDNS. FreeDNS is a free domain service that is immensely popular among file sharers, blogs, small businesses, and other independent operators. Its homepage is afraid.org.

With the mooo.com shutdown last Friday, the ICE accidentally shut down 84,000 subdomain pages. The pages were all redirected to a banner that stated “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution.”

The court order to shut down and redirect the sites was granted via a seizure warrant from a District Court. The warrant was executed as part of the DHS ICE team’s “Operation Save Our Children”.

Al Jazeera is reporting that state security is trying to enter the building where their Cairo bureau is located. NPR’s Andy Carvin tweeted, “Al Jazeera streaming live video from their office window; police are banging on the door trying to get them to stop.” Followed by a quote from Al Jazeera, “We’ve been streaming live for 5 hrs and the police are clearly not happy about it.” The Raw Story reports that the station may be shut down, but the live feed from Al Jazeera English is still streaming, with reporters breaking the news from Egyptian state media that Mubarak has ordered police reinforcement for the curfew set from 6 p.m. local time, now in place, through to 7 a.m. on Saturday. “It’s not having any effect.”

Here’s raw video that was posted on Youtube five hours ago. It gives you a sense of just how massive the protests in Cairo are. It was shot by Mohamed Ibrahim Elmasry, “a professor emeritus of computer science at a Canadian university who is in Cairo.”