i am disappointed to hear these stories about cert, but encourage others with tales to tell to step forward. this is a real eye-opener.
I just had to deal with a minor crisis caused by CERT. They contacted the domain-admin for the *.fi domain, saying they had been informed that the anonymous ftp archive at anon.penet.fi was being used to distribute illegal copies of software. They did *not* contact me directly, nor my service provider.
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Fortunately I could tell them that anon.penet.fi didn't even run ftp at all, easily verifiable by trying to ftp from anon.penet.fi. They did apologize profusely, but somehow that doesn't quite...
Disturbing pattern that CERT contact people about hosts which perform actions contrary to the wishes of some MIBS. Or is that just paranoia ? I doubt the NSA/FBI/any_other_government_agencies would be crying if either anon.penet.fi or soda were taken off the net...