Last week was unusually exciting around the old Homestead offices, thanks to our brush with one of the more newsworthy events of the decade. It turns out that the high-end prositution ring Elitot Spitzer has confessed to patronizing--Emperor's Club VIP--built their website using Homestead.
To be clear, we do not monitor the content of the sites built using Homestead... we have way too many sites to monitor, even if we wanted to. What's more, it turns out that for legal reasons we cannot monitor our customers sites unless they are brought to our attention by a complaint, the legal authorities, or a call from the owner of the site or other "normal course of business."
So, when news broke like a tsunami last Monday about the Spitzer site, and every web browser in the free world starting hitting www.emperorsclubvip.com (and within minutes had taken down the New York Times and www.ny.gov websites) Homestead's servers started receiving almost 150% of their normal traffic. The good news is that our servers handled the traffic just fine. The bad news is that our system soon automatically disabled the site because it had exceeded (big time) it's alloted gigabytes of traffic and guess what everybody saw instead? A friendly Homestead logo and a message stating "Sorry, the site you are looking for is temporarily unavailable because it has exceeded its bandwidth limits."
Old board members called. My new employer called. NBC Dateline (and other press) called. My mom even called (you can imagine what that conversation was like).
But that's not the whole story. It turns out, unbeknownst to me, that the FBI had contacted us a few months ago and informed us about emperorsclubvip.com and asked us to cooperate with their sting operation. This is not as unusual (or Hollywood) as it sounds. We get several inquiries like this from law authorities every month, and we actually have a well-practiced process that dictates how we balance cooperating with criminal inquiries while also protecting the privacy of our customers. In this case, because of the evidence presented by the FBI--which corroborated with data on the site--we agreed to cooperate with their sting operation.
The FBI failed to mention their prime suspect was the governor of New York.
Thus, because this type of thing is unfortunately rather routine, I was not aware that we were involved with the investigation--or that it was a Homestead site--until everybody else.
Which brings me back to why last week was so eventful. It brought into public view an aspect of our business that has been central to much of Homestead's ten year history. Something that Intuit, our new parent company, has never had to deal with--until last week.
When you introduce a technology or tool to society, you are not in control of how it is used. Most of the time inventors are not even aware of how their invention is ulimately used, but when the technology is on the internet, you can actually WITNESS it. This is a beautiful thing--people do amazing things with it that you (the creator) never imagined. This is also a terrifying thing--people do things that you wish they wouldn't, or which violate your sense of right and wrong. There are many sites hosted at Homestead which are legal, but make my skin crawl (see www.michaelsavage.com). Even though I despise what sites like that say, I really would die to defend their right to say it.
Luckily for us, over the years less than 1/100th of one percent of our (millions of) sites have come to our attention as being objectionable or illegal. But each time we have had to balance the rights of our customers to use this platform that we nurtured and created with the laws of the country and our responsibilities as a business.
When all the dust settled last week, the feeling I was left with was what a great privilege it is to have created (and still run) a business that has such interesting ethical, constitutional, and social implications.
Now if I could only get my new parent company to enjoy it as much as I do. :o)
--jsk
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