Free Speech Is So Out Of Style For The Obama Administration
Disgustingly, the DOJ "seized a hip hop blog for over a year, and then gave it back, effectively admitting that there was no legal basis for the censorship," reports Mike Masnick at Techdirt.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren asked Attorney General Eric Holder about this and he promised to get back to her and never did:

Of course, since then the secret proceedings in the case (which Dajaz1 was not even allowed to know about, or even have their lawyer speak to the judge) have been unsealed. Those revealed that the ICE Agent in charge of the case, Andrew Reynolds, had basically sat around doing nothing for over a year, waiting for the RIAA to finally provide the evidence that Dajaz1 had broken the law. That evidence was obviously never produced, which is why Dajaz1 eventually got its domain back.

There was another oversight hearing yesterday, and Zoe Lofgren quizzed Holder again, noting that not only did he not respond to her questions, but also highlighting the unsealed documents, which show that the original affidavit was misleading.

...Holder first responds that he "believes" the seizures were legal, because the court signed off on them. Lofgren immediately challenges that, noting the incorrect or misleading information in the affidavit, and asking if he believes it's okay to censor a site for over a year and not allow the site to even be heard by the court in all that time. At that point, he at least admits that if the affidavit was "misleading" that "that would not be an appropriate basis for action on behalf of the government." He also notes that seizure is a powerful tool that needs to be used "judiciously." And then notes that if what Lofgren descrbied was accurate "that would be of great concern."

More from Masnick here -- some truly awful and scary stuff for anyone who cares about civil liberties:

In fact, as the details came out, it became clear that ICE and the Justice Department were in way over their heads. ICE's "investigation" was done by a technically inept recent college grad, who didn't even seem to understand the basics of the technology. But it didn't stop him from going to a judge and asking for a site to be completely censored with no due process.

The Dajaz1 case became particularly interesting to us, after we saw evidence showing that the songs that ICE used in its affidavit as "evidence" of criminal copyright infringement were songs sent by representatives of the copyright holder with the request that the site publicize the works -- in one case, even coming from a VP at a major music label. Even worse, about the only evidence that ICE had that these songs were infringing was the word of the "VP of Anti-Piracy Legal Affairs for the RIAA," Carlos Linares, who was simply not in a position to know if the songs were infringing or authorized. In fact, one of the songs involved an artist not even represented by an RIAA label, and Linares clearly had absolutely no right to speak on behalf of that artist.

Despite all of this, the government simply seized the domain, put up a big scary warning graphic on the site, suggesting its operators were criminals, and then refused to comment at all about the case. Defenders of the seizures insisted that this was all perfectly legal and nothing to be worried about. They promised us that the government had every right to do this and plenty of additional evidence to back up its claims. They promised us that the government would allow for plenty of due process within a reasonable amount of time. They also insisted that, after hearing nothing happening in the case for many months, it meant that no attempt to object to the seizure had occurred. Turns out... none of that was true.

...If Congress needs to do anything, it should be to investigate the lawless, unconstitutional, cowboy censorship and blocking of due process by both Homeland Security and the Justice Department. The last thing it should be doing is allowing more such actions. This whole thing has been a disgrace by the US government, starting with a bogus seizure, improper and illegal censorship, followed by denial of due process and unnecessary secrecy.

Read the rest at the link, of the horrible and Kafka-esque process the government put the site owner and his lawyer through.