I am just sharing a quick take on something that came to mind that occured earlier this year that I had forgotten about. I just received a domain renewal for a project that was dead in the water but should have been alive, and was unilaterally killed by the AWS Trust and Safety team in gaslighting. It is a bit too late, but I still think it is important for people to know.

Earlier this year (2025), a software engineering friend of mine had a great idea of creating a tool to pin on a map interface any ICE (the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement) sightings from the public. I vibe coded it last February with Claude Sonnet 3.7, and put it up on AWS with a public facing domain. From a coding standpoint, it was a fun project because it was my first project that Terraformed a production app using Claude, autonomously. I had a website up that worked on desktop and mobile. From a public trust and safety standpoint, it helped by adding public accountability and mitigating overreach by a rogue, and potentially in some circumstances operating illegaly, agency. It was overall A Good Thing™.

However, what happened next was upsetting and shocking to me. A day after the website was put online, without me advertising it to ANYONE, the website became inaccessible to almost all browsers. It would simply show a giant red background saying this is associated with known criminals, etc., and has been blocked for safety. It is some Chrome / Google maintained blacklist mechanism that looks even scarier and more severe than the "https / http" / cert issue mismatch, and that cannot be overridden. To be clear, I had registered a certificate using AWS Certificate Manager, and there was no SSL issue. Instead, the domain had been unilaterally marked as "dangerous" by AWS (or Google, Chrome, whomever) one day after it was made publicly accessible, despite no advertising / attention.

I did all of this on my personal AWS account. The very next day, I received a scary email from AWS that claimed my account was violating their policies due to supporting criminal activity, and will be suspended immediately unless I remediate the account. I contacted AWS, who demurred and said they weren't sure what was going on, but that their Trust and Safety team had flagged dangerous activity on my account (they did NOT specify any resources related to the application I had put up; they were generic and vague with no specificity). The only causal correlate was me putting up this public tool to report ICE. I terraform destroyed the resources Claude generated, and then waited. Within a day, the case was closed and my account was restored to normal status.

I am not going to share the domain name, but needless to say, this pissed me off majorly. What the fuck, AWS? (and Google, and Chrome, and anyone else that had a hand in this?) I understand mistakes happen, but this does not smell like a mistake; this smells like some thing worse: a lack of sound judgment. And if there were any automated systems involved, that is no excuse either. Per AWS support's correspondence, they informed me a human in their Trust and Safety had reviewed the account and marked it as delinquent, not from a financial standpoint, but something worse--by equating its resources to criminality. If the concern was what I think it was (corporate cowardice), they should have been intellectually honest, and filed a case stating "We found an application on your account that is outside our policy. Here is the explanation for what we found and why we think it is outside our policy. You can dispute our decision at this link." etc. Instead, I was gaslighted and treated like a guilty until proven innocent subject of weaponized fear (because for a second, with the scary language of the website block and the support email, I was scared.)

That AWS Trust and Safety employee's judgment failed me, and their judgment failed themselves and the public as well as their own responsibility as an arbitrator of trust and safety; their decision, if there was one that can be attributed and not hidden behind the corporate veil of ambiguity, ultimately reduced public trust and safety.