Mozilla resists US agency takedown request

The US Department of Homeland Security has asked Mozilla to remove a Firefox add-on that redirects user requests for seized domains to sites outside American government control.

The request was received more than two weeks ago but the company is resisting the demands of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to remove the MafiaaFire add-on, Harvey Anderson, Mozilla's lawyer, wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

"Recently the US Department of Homeland Security contacted Mozilla and requested that we remove the MafiaaFire add-on. The Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations unit alleged that the add-on circumvented a seizure order DHS had obtained against a number of domain names," Anderson said. "Our approach is to comply with valid court orders, warrants and legal mandates, but in this case there was no such court order."

The DHS said that the add-on — which at the time of writing has only been downloaded a little over 8,000 times — was being used to redirect traffic from domains it alleges were used to stream copyrighted content to other domains outside of US control. However, instead of removing the add-on, Mozilla sent a letter to DHS asking to establish the legal status of the request.

The letter asked questions such as: "Have any courts determined that the MafiaaFire add-on is unlawful or illegal in any way?" It also asked: "Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons?" The company had not received a response to the letter at the time of writing, Anderson said.

Our approach is to comply with valid court orders, warrants and legal mandates, but in this case there was no such court order.

– Harvey Anderson, Mozilla lawyer

However, Anderson said the bigger issue is the potential threat to the open nature of the internet and under what conditions intermediaries should comply with requests that have a censorship effect.

"In this case, the underlying justification arises from content holders' legitimate desire to combat piracy. The problem stems from the use of these government powers in service of private content holders when it can have unintended and harmful consequences," Anderson said.

Site seizures of this nature are executed under a multi-departmental project in the US known as 'Operation in Our Sites', launched in June 2010 with the goal of battling internet piracy, counterfeiting and copyright infringement. In the past year it has seized more than 100 domains as part of its assault on piracy.