RateMyCop.com raises hackles

Perhaps the biggest tech story of the week surrounds RateMyCop, a website founded by one Gino Sesto only two weeks ago as a true form of citizen activism.

The idea: Give Americans a venue to complain about police brutality and inappropriate behavior -- not merely venting at The Man, but a direct outlet to target a specific officer for his or her actions. RateMyCop stored names and/or badge numbers for more than 140,000 officers in 500 police departments around the country. Commenters could leave remarks about any one of them.

That is, until Tuesday, when RateMyCop suddenly went offline.

A crush of press coverage caused traffic to skyrocket, immediately causing the site's database to crumble. But it was the reaction from police departments that has the civics-minded more suspicious.

That response was largely as expected. Cops don't generally care for watchdogs, with at least one officer complaining that public databases of policemen puts officers in harm's way. (It should be noted that this information is all a matter of public record, though, and that undercover officers are not included in the database.) Another police chief said he wanted to create a law to make RateMyCop illegal.

A new twist emerged, though, as RateMyCop's disappearance was initiated by its web host and registrar, the infamous GoDaddy. GoDaddy first claimed the site was closed due to "suspicious activity," then later said that the site had exceeded its bandwidth limitations. Sesto says he's arranged alternative hosting arrangements and had hoped to have the site back up by Tuesday, but as of this writing the web page still shows GoDaddy's brusque "Oops!!!" error message.

The conversation has now turned to speculation about what really happened.

Was GoDaddy threatened by one or more police departments to shut down the service? (Similar tales abound online of GoDaddy pulling the plug without warning.) Is Sesto's right to free speech being violated? And what happens to RateMyCop at its next destination?

It would be a shame to lose a service like this due to strongarming and paranoia; it's about time Americans had an outlet to discuss police abuses... aside from YouTube, I mean.

UPDATE: Site's back up, with some bugginess, probably due to traffic overload. 

POLL: What do you think?