Funny? No, just boring. "DHS" siezes domain names because DHS was hurriedly created, as a reaction to 9/11, by jamming agencies together like so many insects in the transporter from The Fly. One of those agencies happened to be Immigration and Customs, which has always had IPR enforcement in its portfolio.

Every time people make these conspiracy-theoretic comments about how "Homeland Security" is doing antipiracy raids, they betray either a lack of understanding of how their government is actually structured, or an easygoing willingness to buy into Internet drama, or both. At least, that's what it looks like to me.

It does have an interesting psychological effect, though, possibly on both the recipients of orders, and on the general public. Reminds me a bit of the similar accident of jurisdiction that led to 1980s teenage hax0rz being raided by the Secret Service, rather than by more normal-sounding police.

Is there some controversy about the Secret Service involvement during Sun Devil? Those were interstate crimes, not to mention the fact that no local police force was in any way equipped to deal with the problem.

Not political controversy, just the psychological aspect that it was The Secret Service, the dramatic earpiece-wearing folks in movies who keep the president from being shot, not to mention a police agency with the conspiracy-driving word "secret" in their name. If we instead had the U.S. Government Computer Crime Agency, it'd be a lot more pedestrian.

It probably has more to do with how few people understood that the Secret Service is was really more like the Treasury Police, and protecting the President was only a small part of what they did. The protective details are the only thing interesting enough to make movies about, hence the mystique.