A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: March 4, 2008 10:26:44 AM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

[Note:  This item comes from reader Jack Unger.  DLH]

From: Jack Unger <junger () ask-wi com>
Date: March 4, 2008 12:33:48 AM PST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

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 <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/cuba/index.html?inline=nyt-geo 
>. 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 <http://www.cuba-hemingway.com>,  
were literary. Others, like www.cuba-havanacity.com <http://www.cuba-havanacity.com 
>, discussed Cuban history and culture. Still others —  
www.ciaocuba.com <http://www.ciaocuba.com> and www.bonjourcuba.com <http://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 <http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sdn/prgrmlst.txt 
> 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.

Mr. Marshall said he did not understand “how Web sites owned by a  
British national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected  
by U.S. law.” Worse, he said, “these days not even a judge is required  
for the U.S. government to censor online materials....


<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/us/04bar.html?ex=1362286800&en=a5067fa5263b7b0f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all 
>

-------------------------------------------
Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com