Investigating a Website

[Buffy]

There is a website I want to know more about.

I've accessed their whois lookup information, but that doesn't tell me anything (I think) that I can do anything with.

I want to know who registered it, how to get in touch with a site admin or owner, where the website is located in terms of countries, etc.

I'm think the content of the website might be protected/restricted by certain laws and I'm wondering how the website can still be up after 2+ years and not be shut down by the feds.

Anyone looked into that type of stuff before?

[Gulkeeva]

Most you could do, is use something like
http://whois.domaintools.com/

contact the DNS company and talk with them and 99% of the time they will "pass along" whatever it is to the actual host owner (namely stuff like C&D orders and DMCA stuff)

As for why a website may still be around for years even though possibly many? people have reported it. "usually" site operators research their host, and the country it is in so that whatever is hosted on the site will not get the said site operator in trouble (unless its really really illegal like nuclear weapon sales, exotic drugs etc).

If its "what you consider bad" such as loli, animal sex, racist videos, militaristic acts videos (beheadings, religious propaganda war terrorism for example) some hosts don't really care about it as long as they are getting paid (and yes, some of that stuff is actually allowed in some states in the USA to an extent). Some countries/hosts will even ignore DMCA/C&D orders.

[Ragns]

Don't you have people at your workplace to answer this kind of questions better?

Most shady sites will use reverse proxies services to hide their origin and use proxy registrations to hide who own the domain name so your best option is usually e-stalking.