For a while Monday, it looked like AlterNIC domain-name warrior Eugene Kashpureff might get to leave the Toronto jail where he's been held since Halloween. But after an immigration court granted bail, the police stepped in to make sure Kashpureff stays locked up.
"Somebody's got it in for Mr. Kashpureff in a big way," said William R. Gilmour, Kashpureff's legal counsel in Canada. "This is being driven from very high heights."
Gilmour said that the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada ordered Monday that Kashpureff be released on C$10,000 bail.
"They directed that the surety appear at the Immigration Centre and post the bail of $10,000, and said that the release documents would be there in 15 minutes," said Gilmour. "The surety ran all over the country and got $10,000 in certified funds, appeared at the release station and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited. Finally, after an hour and a half, they were told, 'We're not going to release him - he's now being held on a police warrant.'"
After going back to the jail where Kashpureff was being held, Gilmour said that the release station did not in fact have a police warrant, but wasn't prepared to release him because the release order granted earlier in the day had not yet arrived.
"We waited for another half hour, and finally the police showed up with an extradition warrant," said Gilmour.
An extradition hearing has been scheduled in Toronto for Wednesday morning. Gilmour said the issue now is whether Kashpureff will attempt to remain in Canada, leave the country voluntarily, or be extradited. This will drag out for "probably another three weeks," he said.
Kashpureff had been working on and off in Canada for the past year, and was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police almost two weeks ago on an FBI warrant stemming from his attack on Network Solution Inc.'s InterNIC domain-name registry over the summer. He redirected users from www.internic.net to his own www.alternic.net in a "protest of the so-called 'ownership' of domain names."
In a telephone interview from Toronto's Metro West Detention Centre last week, Kashpureff noted he had settled out of court with Network Solutions and issued a public apology, which he reaffirmed while a guest speaker at last month's ISPCon. He also commented on what he said was a "gross misstatement" in the Canadian arrest affidavit - that his hack redirected both www.internic.net and the plain internic.net. "That's an outright misstatement, whether it's intentional or otherwise. I didn't do it," he said.
The affidavit's implication was that he completely blocked acccess to the InterNIC's computers, when in fact only people attempting to connect to "www.internic.net" were redirected, and even then were provided with a link back to the InterNIC site.
Furthermore, he said, he didn't redirect anyone who didn't ask for it: "DNS responses are just that - responses to a query. They came to me, asking about a name. They just got more data back than expected," he said.
