Earlier this week, we predicted that either today or tomorrow, we’d hear about ICE and the DOJ once again seizing a bunch of websites… and here it is. This morning, ICE announced that it had seized another 313 websites based on its highly questionable legal theory concerning taking down websites without any adversarial hearing. Of course, lately it’s moved away from doing site seizures concerning websites that deal with content/copyright issues, and focused instead on those it claims are selling counterfeit merchandise. Along those lines, ICE announced that it arrested a few people with counterfeit Super Bowl merchandise.

Of course, this is all for show. Waiting until just a couple days before the Super Bowl is pretty ridiculous, since if people were going to buy merch, they already did so. This is just ICE, once again, generating headlines for the corporations it seems to think it represents. As is his usual MO, ICE boss John Morton talked up just how “successful” this operation was, based on his own metrics, claiming “This just takes good old-fashioned police work, people getting out on the streets.”

Funny, then, that he completely leaves out the parts where they seized legitimate merchandise and hassled the seller. It appears that, sometimes, ICE just isn’t very good at “good old-fashioned police work.” And that’s especially true when it seems to be taking orders from big companies, rather than the public it is supposed to be protecting.

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