Moderators/Administrators/attorneys,
Do you know where the ECCIE servers are hosted, US or foreign soil? If foreign soil, can those laws be enforced?
I know the Canadian CL personals section is alive and well. If you attempt to view a US posting from the Canadian CL, it is blocked like the US CL personals, but the Canadian posts are view-able.
I hate to think of a world so f#cked up that folks would need to rely on an eMail distribution list or private web site/blog.
Originally Posted by tonyTF
It's a minimum contacts question for whether a foreign website/ISP is subject to US laws if they try to enforce them in a US court. It's also a question as to where the website is located. For example, Argentina could give a shit about US internet laws and the US gov't will probably be hard pressed to enforce any US ruling there. However, that doesn't mean a ruling in a US court won't block that website from being accessible from the USA.
For example with ECCIE, lets assume it's hosted in a place like Argentina. Considering the sheer amount of users and specifics to the USA I'd say it is more than passively reaching the USA and would be subject to some form of jurisdiction in US courts. Lets assume the USA wins some sort of battle to shut it down (kind of like they did the backpage escort section). The US gov't would be hard pressed to actually force the shutdown of the website itself because they would need the Argentinian gov't to pursue it. However, I imagine that means they could block access to it from networks in America.
I am a plaintiff's personal injury attorney. So I don't really know much about internet based laws, server locations, foreign enforcement, etc. That's my best guess considering past news and whatnot. IMO hosting a site like this on a US server is just dumb. Most of the shutdowns recently are voluntary and preemptive to avoid criminal liability which is what the US gov't failed to get in the backpage cases, hence the change in the law. The personal repercussion changes vastly when it goes from civil enforcement on an entity to criminal prosecution on the owners personally.
EDIT: This also assumes ONLY the US gov't seeking censorship. Private entities can censor websites, for example google could completely delete a site like eccie from its search results. Whoever eccie uses for anti-ddos and protections could withdraw service essentially ending the website (like they did with the dailystormer). There's a whole bunch of issues. Whoever they use for their DNS could cut them off.