JotForm domain released by Secret Service, won’t say why it was seized

Late on February 15, JotForm lost access to jotform.com. The company soon discovered the U.S. government had seized the domain by lodging a request with the site’s domain registrar GoDaddy. Soon after, it had been taken down.

Aytekin Tank, co-founder of Interlogy Internet Technologies, and owner of JotForm, later confirmed that he’d been in contact with the agent assigned to his case at the Secret Service. She was busy and couldn’t look at the site for a few days. So millions of web forms and thousands of customers were left without a service and no reason as to why this had happened.

Jump to today, and it looks as though jotform.com has been released. It is slowly coming back online and users can gain access to their forms again. Either the Secret Service agent found some time and cleared the site, or the growing interest online as to why this had happened forced someone to make the JotForm case a priority.

So what did happen? We have no idea, and neither does JotForm. The Secret Service is refusing to say why the domain was seized. All they will say is that the process they used to seize it will be reviewed to make sure correct protocol was followed. In other words, JotForm will never know what happened, and it could happen to them again, or any other site for that matter without any warning.

It seems incredible that any section of a government can have the power to take such action, possibly destroy a business, and then carry on without explanation. This really can’t be allowed to happen without some form of warning and feedback system in place. The website owner should be contacted before the take down if appropriate, they need to be informed why it has happened, and how long the process will take. Anything less is unacceptable.