14 DAY TRIAL // The Department of Homeland Security has unsuccessfully tried to get Mozilla to remove an extension called MafiaaFire Redirector from its official add-ons repository.
The incident was revealed by Harvey Anderson, Mozilla's general counsel and vice president of business affairs, who said the DHS complained the add-on circumvents domain seizure orders it obtained.
Since November 2010, the DHS' U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm has been seizing domain names as part of an operation that targets websites violating copyright and other laws.
The controversial seizures included domain names belonging to torrent search engines that did nothing more than index links like Google, online video streaming businesses based and operating legally in the European Union, and even a popular domain belonging to a free DNS provider.
The MafiaaFire Redirector extension was created with the purpose of redirecting seized domains to their alternative-tld versions.
"We plan to maintain a list of URLs, and their duplicate sites (for example Demoniod.com and Demoniod.de) and painlessly redirect you to the correct site," the extension's developers say.
"We control the redirection _before_ (and this is important) the browser tries to connect to the DNS server. Whatever blocks, notices, threats, etc ICE or anyone else puts up at the DNS level is as worthless as the IFPI/RIAA/MPAA to mankind," they explain.
It's no wonder that such an add-on would upset ICE, but there's one problem though - it does not have a court ruling to take it down. In addition, the same behavior can be achieved by manually editing the Windows "hosts" file.
"Our approach is to comply with valid court orders, warrants, and legal mandates, but in this case there was no such court order," Mozilla's Anderson said about the company's refusal to honor the request.
"To evaluate Homeland Security’s request, we asked them several questions [...] to understand the legal justification. To date we’ve received no response from Homeland Security nor any court order," he added.