Re: U.S. Treasury 'Watch List' Causes eNom to Yank Legitimate Travel Domai ns

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

Too bad those Brits don't have the First Amendment to protect themselves
from this blatant example of government censorship! ;-)

Richard

-----Original Message-----
From: funsec-bounces () linuxbox org [mailto:funsec-bounces () linuxbox org] On
Behalf Of Paul Ferguson
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 2:43 PM
To: funsec () linuxbox org
Subject: [funsec] U.S. Treasury 'Watch List' Causes eNom to Yank Legitimate
Travel Domai ns

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Via The New York Times.

[snip]

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells
trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In
October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United
States government.

The sites, in English, French and Spanish, had been online since 1998.
Some, like www.cuba-hemingway.com, were literary. Others, like
www.cuba-havanacity.com, discussed Cuban history and culture. Still others
- www.ciaocuba.com and www.bonjourcuba.com - were purely commercial
sites aimed at Italian and French tourists.

"I came to work in the morning, and we had no reservations at all," Mr.
Marshall said on the phone from the Canary Islands. "We thought it was a
technical problem."

It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall's Web sites had been put on a
Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain
name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told
him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based
in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist
through a blog.

Either way, there is no dispute that eNom shut down Mr. Marshall's sites
without notifying him and has refused to release the domain names to him.
In effect, Mr. Marshall said, eNom has taken his property and interfered
with his business. He has slowly rebuilt his Web business over the last
several months, and now many of the same sites operate with the suffix .net
rather than .com, through a European registrar. His servers, he said, have
been in the Bahamas all along.

[snip]

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/us/04bar.html

This is just ludicrous policy FUBAR...

- - ferg


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--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg(at)netzero.net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/


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