Domains Blocked By US Treasury 'Blacklist' 525
yuna49 writes "Adam Liptak of the New York Times reports today about the plight of a Spanish tour operator whose domain names have been embargoed by his domain name registrar (eNom). They pulled his domains after they discovered the tour operator's name on a US Treasury blacklist. It turns out he packages tours to Cuba largely for European tourists who can legally travel there, unlike Americans. The article cites 'a press release issued in December 2004, almost three years before eNom acted. It said Mr. Marshall's company had helped Americans evade restrictions on travel to Cuba and was "a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its people." It added that American companies must not only stop doing business with the company but also freeze its assets, meaning that eNom did exactly what it was legally required to do.' The only part of the operator's business in the United States is his domain name registration; all other aspects of his business lie outside the United States."
So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
*gets out his eraser and starts removing that "Land Of The Free" line from all the songbooks...*
And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
How many here would decry the Chinese and assorted third world countries for censorship of the internet, and yet, here we (in the US) act no differently. It makes me wonder how many things we just don't see, because the DNS entry doesn't even show up.
Are we truly free? Or is that just an illusion?
Get a .eu (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks like there's some merit (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
But, this travel company has learned another lesson: Don't buy domains from eNom, they suck in so many ways....
This is very disturbing (Score:5, Insightful)
I fear we are too trustworthy in the robustness of the internet and I'm even more afraid of the day if the powers at large decide the bring the hammer down. I don't think net neutrality legislation would be effective against a determined oppressor, it only takes a few dragging anchors for them to tear through a few laws.
irony (Score:5, Insightful)
easy enough to fix (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is very disturbing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Want a different policy? Organize like-minded people to VOTE appropriately.
Use a european registrar (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO, we have missed the boat there. With people like Chavez waving suitcases of cash placing a few millions here and there is no longer effective. He can simply outbid the "West" and keep the Castro regime alive for a very long time.
Wikileaks, now eNom... (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds as thought the great firewall of America will be installed sooner or later. Apparently all it would take is a judge and software that has already been developed, tested, and deployed by American companies in China. Not that it's anything new... we've been censoring the internet for more than a decade now in the name of copyright with the 1997 NET Act. It appears the nationalist crowd has modded you flamebait early... maybe some sane meta-mods will take care of that.
wake up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:easy enough to fix (Score:4, Insightful)
Bush and congress are trying to fix that. Welcome to Amerika; lets us make a copy of the data on your laptop, show us your papers, and watch what you say outside of a free-speech zone.
With great power.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Another example [guardian.co.uk] I came upon today is how the White House was planning to overthrow the democratically chosen Hamas party, because it didn't stroke with their plans.
What happened with "With great power comes great responsibility"? The US is just acting as the schoolyard bully.
Note that I understand that "The US" != "all US citizens", but please, you're the only ones that can do something about this. So please do so.
You have to love our freedoms (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And yet... (Score:2, Insightful)
In China, if you criticize the leaders of your country, you wind up either dead or in jail.
In the USA, if you criticize the leaders of your country, you wind up rich.
In China, there are no Koses, no Limbaughs, no Gores, no Moores, no one that criticizes the regime or calls for political change. In Iran, well, its illegal to even be jewish.
So yeah, there are differences....
Re:And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
So why compare yourselves with China? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=389&year=2007 USA 16th
But do you really expect people to think freely if they've been spouting the pledge of allegence since they were 5?
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cuba trades with Canada, Europe, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil... but an AMERICAN embargo will force them to change. Yeah. That's working well, after four decades of communism, tourism, cheap gas, and free technology.
Re:With great power.. (Score:-1, Insightful)
So you object to a government standing against terrorists?
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Looks like there's some merit (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone doing business with Cuba knows about the embargo; it's possible he didn't realize that his registrar was an american company and that his domain could be seized, but that's not going to keep the law from going into effect.
The underlying problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Our Constitution is quite possibly the greatest piece of law ever written in the history of mankind. Unfortunately, the politicians (both democrats and republicans) have decided it can be ignored at will. We need to change this. We need to force every aspect of the government to operate under the full strength of our Constitution.
No more seizing property without due process.
No more stifling free speech just because it might offend somebody.
No more wiretaps of citizens and legal residents to fight terrorists without a court order signed by a REAL judge.
No more government agencies that aren't sanctioned by the Constitution (list to long to put here).
I am sicked by any politician who doesn't consider the Constitution the most sacred document in existence. Which means I'm sicked by ALL politicians.
Re:Pay Attention (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sheesh, it's almost like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, its almost like we're immature children who spitefully cling to their hatred long after the conflict is over and everyone else has grown up and gotten over it.
Hell, we've even made peace with the country that actually designed, built, and deployed the missles to cuba. You know, the country that actually owned them and put them their with the express purpose of creating a threat? The country that the 'cold war' was actually with? We made peace with them. But apparently our rage for a dying old man whose island they were on... for him... our hatred is boundless.
Grow up aready.
Yes, -1 Not conforming with majority opinion
No. -1 for being an immature and childish country.
You know, because of that whole trying to murder tens of millions of us and all.
You might want to check your history. The Soviets put missiles in Cuba in response to the fact that the USA put missiles in Turkey. Not that it stops their of course, the cold war was a series of moves and responses, but the point remains... Castro was a PAWN in a much bigger game of chess [er... global thermonuclear war] and his role and personal relevance was laughably minor.
Re:Looks like there's some merit (Score:3, Insightful)
To be fair, EU nations are also known to have laws censoring things their governments are uneasy about; see, for example, prosecutions of online auction sites by France and Germany, on grounds that those sites did not comply with laws banning the sale of Nazi memorabilia.
Messing with DNS is the best you can do? (Score:3, Insightful)
In light of this and the wikileaks thing, I think it's interesting that the best we can do to censor foreign websites, is mess with their DNS registrar. Long term, that is just not going to be a viable tactic. It's like wack-a-mole, except that after the first mole, the remaining moles are out of reach.
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You have to love our freedoms (Score:5, Insightful)
God knows I'm not saying the Castros are happy little fuzzy angels who never did no wrong, but it's indisputable that they're a damn sight better than some of the thugs we happily deal with in the rest of the world. It's ridiculous and childish to blame everything on them, but it plays well in certain areas of south Florida which hold disproportionate power come election time.
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about blocking Saudi travel firms (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
A country should be judged on the basis of how much freedom its people have, not by the fact that there are people elsewhere who have it worse off.
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How about blocking Saudi travel firms (Score:3, Insightful)
You kidding me? If the Saudis ever had a popular revolution start up, the US would send everything we got to keep them propped up and in place.
Country level TLDs only (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:3, Insightful)
Embargo America (Score:4, Insightful)
i find the america bashing ironic (Score:3, Insightful)
if you as a cuban tried this in cuba, it is in the law of the land to arrest and jail you
if you doubt that, i'm not going to be your google monkey: go to the massively neocon sources of amnesty international and human rights watch and tell me what they say about the law in cuba about saying bad things about the government
so please, by all means, bash the us government: it's your right, you are respected as an american to bash your own government. just try to understand exactly what the real enemy is here. some people have a colossal lack of scale and perspective
Re:Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
No it isn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
The lack of universal suffrage.
The electoral college and variegated citizenship.
The concept of equality and fairness.
It is folly to assume a document written in the 1700's would be a very good fit for the 2000's.
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
But it still attempts to tell the world how we should follow [i]their[/i] example. No thanks, I actually like my freedoms.
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are "Americans" who have suffering relatives IN Cuba, (I believe there are permissions with limits on how much US citizens can send annually to Cuba), and it ought to be criminal to expect people to put on a uniform to potentially go and kill or threaten to kill relatives in OR outside the country.
I think the US government and some wealthy are just royally pissed that Fidel, like Kim Jong-Il, didn't just 'vanish' or 'die". Castro outlived MULTIPLE US presidents... must be an embarrassment to the USA...
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:4, Insightful)
Try again later with the "doing what's right" herring.
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
So Cuban will not be accepted as a democracy by the US until, they turn themselves back into the working poor for American corporations. Of course whether the Cubans actually elect a leader or a military coup takes place establishing an autocracies, makes absolutely not the slightest bit of difference to the end of the embargo.
All this does is highlight why other countries do not trust the current US administration with the central domain register, because as far as the current US administration is concerned, US corporate law is international law.
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
The South African Apartheid regime collapsed due to pressure from sanctions. But the reasons were psychological, not economic. The regime saw itself as an unacknowledged part of the West, the rejection had real and visible effect. Once it became clear that the US was also on the brink of rejecting it, the regime crumbled.
The Cuban situation is exactly the reverse, the only thing keeping Castro in power was the fact that he had successfully stood up to the US when it had acted as a big bully.
The human rights issue is not likely to be very effective when the US is running the best known gulag and torture house on the island.
This is a case where trade can have a positive effect and every policy maker in DC knows it, even the Republicans. The only reason that the embargo is kept in place is to pander to the Cuban vote in Florida.
Thats the way ethnic politics are played in the US. While mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani would attack terrorism over lunch in Brooklyn, then head off for dinner to give a 'humanitarian award' to the leader of the terrorist group that has caused by far the most deaths in Europe. Different constituencies, different positions. I don't think he was pro-Israel or pro-IRA, he just wanted the votes and would do anything it took to get them.
The people the politicians pander to are your usual expatriate irredentists, they can afford to refuse all compromise, they don't live with the consequences.
So what exactly is the difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:3, Insightful)
Given the current state of the GOP it is hard to see them managing to pose a serious obstacle. Their main objective in November is going to be to deny the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
Take a look at the turnout in the Democratic primaries versus the GOP ones. The Democrats were getting twice the turnout in deep red states when both races were still competitive. It has since increased substantially. It looks like the post-Bush political realignment may be even greater than the post-Nixon realignment. Bush has smashed up the Republican party.
Re:With great power.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Loath as I am to point this out, there was another fringe political party not unlike Hamas that won parliamentary elections in Germany a few decades back, and instead of finding a way to peacefully coexist with them we defeated them in war and tried the leaders for their war crimes. Democratically elected government or not, launching rockets into residential neighborhoods to kill people is terrorism, and the people who commit terrorism are terrorists.
Re:The underlying problem (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's such a great piece of law, how come so much of it can be interpreted so many different ways? Like that bit about guns.
Re:And yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
JFK was personally involved with Cuba, bullets were fired and missiles were moved back and forth. I can understand his actions, they were related to contemporary events. However JFK is dead for quite some time, as well as some of Presidents who followed him. Mistreating Cuba for half a century is no more reasonable as whipping your dog daily, for 20 years, for him chewing your shoe when he was a puppy.
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most likely the fear isn't that Americans would turn Communist, but that seeing Cuba as it actually is would undo over half a century of US propaganda about Communism. They might even start questioning other things the US Government claims. Which would be very bad news indeed for past and present members of Congress, the White House, the CIA, NSA, etc, etc.
Re:So why compare yourselves with China? (Score:-1, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
We do keep trying, and we're a big step up from most of the world. But we're not there yet, and this administration has certainly hurt us.
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:3, Insightful)
Errrmmm... There's one place that human rights are not respected on Cuba. It's called 'Guantanamo Bay [wikipedia.org]'.
Re:So Americans Who Sympathize With Cuba... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does the strenght of Cuban economy actually matter ? There is no way Cuba is going to launch a succesfull invasion on the US on its own, no matter how strong its economy; and if it is used as a stronghold by another power, it again doesn't matter.
If anything, having ties of trade to the US would make Cuba less likely to allow another country to attack its trading partner through it...
Re:So what exactly is the difference (Score:3, Insightful)
Cuba had as much capability to reach the US with nuclear weapons as Germany (or Turkey, for that matter) had to reach the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons - none. Any nuclear weapons on these nations territory were not under the control of their respective leaders, but firmly under the control of the superpower that stationed them there. And any attempt at gaining control of these weapons would, quite likely, have led to them being used on that nation.
Sorry. Superpowers don't hand out nukes to their allies, with maybe, just maybe, one exception (though the country in question has probably developed its own nukes by now. Yes, it's one of those countries that "probably" has nukes. I'll leave it up to you to guess which one it is.)