Posted on 03/07/2008 8:42:49 PM PST by FreeInWV
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. ...
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. ...
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.” ...
Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading authority on Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name registrars are based in the United States gives the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, control “over a great deal of speech — none of which may be actually hosted in the U.S., about the U.S. or conflicting with any U.S. rights.” ...
“OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear,” Professor Crawford said. ...
That, Professor Crawford said, is a scandal. “The way we communicate these days is through domain names, and the Treasury Department should not be interfering with domain names just as it does not interfere with telecommunications lines.” ...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
You should read the entire article.
And people want to give even MORE authority to FedGov... Amazing!
Am I missing something here? I'm definately not missing the whining "visiting professor", and I'm not missing the New York Times blathering on something about which it has no clue.
What I *am* missing:
1. The guy's American domain registrar pulled the plug on his names. Why couldn't he just use an overseas registrar?
2. The guy's American domain registrar did NOT shutdown his sites in response to a Treasury Dept. request. Rather somebody pointed them toward a list on a blog so they shut them down. Why?
3. Since when is shutting down a website denying this FOREIGNER free speech? He had all the free speech he wanted. He had 80+ domain names. Just think; there are starving people in India that don't even have a single domain name. Surely the NYT could have printed a more interesting story using that angle.
Hmmmm....
So all I have to do is post on my blog a list of sites I don’t like claiming they are on a Federal watch list and they’ll get shut down?
Hmmmm...
I’ll see you guys later. I have the urge to make a blog post.
The article says that the owner discovered that the sites were down from a blog site. Not that that the blog had any part in getting them shut down. Poor wording on NYT’s part I guess.
LOL. I have only three. Sigh.
“Since when is shutting down a website denying this FOREIGNER free speech? He had all the free speech he wanted. He had 80+ domain names. Just think; there are starving people in India that don’t even have a single domain name. Surely the NYT could have printed a more interesting story using that angle.”
Since he doesn’t appear to be breaking US law, or targeting US citizens, why should his 80+ websites be shut down? Why, once they were shut down, weren’t they released to him to be reactivated on an overseas registrar? How you going to feel when FR gets shut down? Or Drudge, Fox, or anyone else? Heck, even DU?
Think about all the heck over Free Dominion’s problems with the Canadian star chamber? You REALLY want to see that kind of crap happening here? Or can you just not see that far ahead?
What, the Imperial US government go to far; tell me it ain't so! Time to take 99.99% of those bureaucrats in DC , give them a gun and stand them on the border so at least they do something useful. (The guns are for show; give them bullets and they're libel to shoot a US citizen or themselves.)
Bump
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