More than a year ago, the music blog Dajaz1.com was shut down for supposedly abetting online piracy. The feds gave no warning, no due process, no trial, and kept all supposed court orders under seal. But that's not the even the most fucked up part.

As if everything else wasn't bad enough, the blundering greenhorn investigator handling the case for the Department of Homeland Security couldn't even get his totalitarianism right: Because Dajaz1 did nothing wrong, federal prosecutors couldn't even make an unconstitutional case against the blog and hat to let it drop. Now the site is back, and TechDirt has a fantastic, and fantastically depressing, rundown on what went wrong, and what went horribly wrong, and what went horrifyingly horribly wrong. There is an entire catalog of real-life dystopian government terror tactics at work in this tale: Bullying, shadow judges, false statements by the recording industry, a wall of silence and secrecy against the site's lawyer, federal agencies caught in lies, federal agencies breaking their own bullshit kangaroo court rules. Read it and weep.

But, hey, at least Dajaz1.com is back, because some "technically inept recent college grad" working for U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcements, or one of his lawyers, decided to drop the case. Relying on the mercy of government bureaucrats is the new "checks and balances."

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