[governance] A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

Wed Mar 5 15:19:52 EST 2008

It wasn't the powers the Department of Commerce has that were used here. They were completely different from what I can tell, and it was powers the Department of Treasury has, so a different arm of government and different powers in use. I wouldn't say it has to do with the spine of the registrar or the registrant either. Not everyone has the time and money needed to challenge orders like this. And maybe they, or maybe they didn't too, took legal advice and it wasn't favourable.

And the main problem with just posting articles to me is when full articles are posted it's a blatant breach of copyright.

David

----- Original Message ----
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net>
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; KovenRonald at aol.com
Sent: Thursday, 6 March, 2008 3:19:12 AM
Subject: RE: [governance] A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

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Oh, I am not about to censor discussion of the issues at
all.  

 It is an interesting discussion – doing business, or not,
with Iran, Cuba and some other nations proscribed by the USG versus this case
here, which affects parties from totally unrelated nations that happen to host
their domain in the USA, with a US based registrar.

 There are also previous cases like wikileaks.org recently, and
well before that, Indymedia some years back.  So this is not a very new
issue as such.     It is a known issue, and one that would
probably persist even after the ITU, or the IGF, or the MAG, or whichever other
new three letter organization ends up running the show .. because of a simple
principle, sovereignity of a country.  

 What you had was DoC contacting a US business (a registrar based
in the USA) and telling them about this issue, demanding a takedown.   OK,
so some bureaucrat didn’t apply his mind very much to this case. 
Point granted here. But that was a US bureaucrat sending a notice to a US based
company.

 Addressing this first depends on the amount of spine that the
registrar actually has.  And then needs to be addressed by this guy suing
the registrar + USG for this unintended extra territorial application of US law
(unless he sold a US citizen a vacation in cuba or something, but even then,
extra territorial).

 This at least can (and should) be challenged in court, as this
entity is arguably not doing business in a location that should be affected by
prohibitions on doing business with cuba.

 From: KovenRonald at aol.com[mailto:KovenRonald at aol.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2008 9:39 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] A Wave of the Watch List, and SpeechDisappears

 Dear Suresh --

Oh, dear, that comment does sound in and of itself like attempted censorship.

The NYTimes article was interesting, news to me, and demonstrated (contrary towhat I had thought) that the USG has used its I'net oversight powers for a formof censorship. I thought it was a perfectly valid piece of info to put on thelist, and certainly more interesting than a lot of the personal backbiting thatsometimes makes me want the list to just go away somewhere else.

Best regards, Rony Koven

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