Time for the Internet police?

You may not be aware but over the last few days a small startup called JotForm.com has been in the line of fire from what we believe to be the FBI. Why? There has been no official word, but their domain was pulled from under them on instructions from a US agency to their domain supplier, believed to be GoDaddy.

The affect has been enormous. The company hosts forms, actually great forms and over 2 million of them. I use them on my sites as many others do embedded in my web pages. The results are stored for me and emailed to me as you fill them in. We automatically work with this data to provide our clients a service. It’s great for feedback forms, orders, people requiring information.

So why were they closed down at the click of a finger for a US agency? Well nobody really knows, but 24 hours after the closure I received an email to tell me to change the domain to JotFormPro.com and everything would be restored? I read a post on a news source RSS feed that says you can swap to Jotform.net.

The writing in the blog on the site says their domain was pulled. Rumour has it because of a phishing scam? Maybe the right response would have been for the agency to ask for the form to be pulled or for the user’s forms that were involved to be pulled.

Is it time we had some international laws governing the Internet?
Is it time we had an International police force who understands how it works in control. Obviously it did not happen in this case as if I received a mail to change the domain to .net then so did whoever caused the issue in the first place.

We have a lawless internet. So many scams. So many phishing emails. So many attempts to break into other sites or malicious code generated and sent round the world. But what are we doing about it as it is increasing many fold.

Imagine your high street bank being attacked all day and night with people with pick axes smashing down the doors and walls.

What would be the correct response in our society. Build a high secure wall? Then as that is broken down build a second wall and put guards in the space between?

No we arrest the people and put them in prison.

But on the internet, we are just building wall after wall after wall and they still come to break them down in masses. Why are we not acting to police this in a different manner.

Newswires report that JotForm has been restored, but not yet as far as I can see. It may take 48 hours to propagate the network. So my service has been out of action for 4 days. Did someone get a court order to do this, will it ever be made public.

When will we start to police this in a different manner and educate those out there that it is not socially acceptable to surf the net with a pick axe?