Posted on July 24th, 2010
Blogetery, free blog hosting website has been shut down by BurstNet hosting provider because of speculations that it has posted bomb-making instructions on the website. Blogetery has now been taken offline for this very reason.
In a statement given to WebHosting Talk a week ago, the Blogetery’s operator strongly disparaged BurstNet for shutting down the site only on the indistinct clarification of abuse. He added that we still do not know the name of law enforcement agency that ordered the shutdown.
With this statement from Blogetery, there has been a lot of talk in the WHT thread and online news agencies about the identity of the law enforcement agency.
In response, BurstNet released a note explaining that it shut down Blogetery after it has got request from a law enforcement agency inquiring about the ownership of Blogetery.
“It was revealed that a link to terrorist material, including bomb-making instructions and an al-Qaeda ‘hit list,’ had been posted to the site.”
BurstNet further explained that Blogetery caused a great threat provoking harmful activities which are clearly against the company’s policies, which prevent everyone not to post anything related to “terrorist propaganda, racist material or bomb/weapon instructions.”
“Due to this violation and the fact that the site had a history of previous abuse, BurstNET® elected to immediately disable the system,” explains the statement.
The interesting part of the statement was that BurstNet made the decision to shut down the site itself while it was previously understood that law enforcement agency is the only reason behind taking the service offline.
There has been lot of talk on the decision of BurstNet on handling this case. There are different opinions where some questions are being asked about the freedom of speech and shutting off the innocent blogs. However, there is some strong encouragement from hosting community, especially from WebHosting Talk, appreciating BurstNet decision.
Chris Pirillo, a famous blogger has expressed his thoughts as, “This has nothing to do with Freedom of Speech rights being violated. This appears (the way it’s being reported at this point in time) to be a case of threat of harm to American citizens and land. I have to agree that in a situation like this one, the hosting company did the best possible thing in shutting the entire service down until such time as it can again be deemed to be safe.”