US Homeland Security shuts down British travel agent

[eridani]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030408L.shtml

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.

[aquart]

1. The War on Tourism continues.

Did a stewardess refuse to serve Georgie a drink once?

[crimsonblue]

6. Actually, consider this one of the first salvos

of the the War on the Internet. The Repugs fear an open and free internet, because it can circumvent their carefully crafted image. Hence the illegal spying and stuff. Not to mention that At&t wants to make the internet more accesible for rich people...

[Richard Steele]

2. Grrrecommended.

[dave123williams]

3. Does anybody seriously still see communism as a boogyman-worthy threat?

Didn't the wall in Berlin come down like 20 years ago? WTF.

Axe-grinding hardline conservative crazies serving in our Government, sounds like.

They're so funny. "I'm going to DC to destroy the Federal Government", they say. And somehow, they're not arrested for that.

They're brainwashed against socialism (or any kind of social thinking) in 1950, and then are supposed to manage today's affairs of state. Wild.

[MadMaddie]

4. Not since the Soviet Union Fell but the Republicans still think

there is a Cold war going on....or should I say they are trying to reignite the Cold war.

This is why it is imperative to get the dim son out of the WH so we can move forward in this country....geesh..all you saying you won't vote for Hillary if she wins or Barack if he wins.....this among other things is what's at stake.

[walldude]

5. They never were a boogyman-worthy threat

Just like Iraq, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Comics, D&D(R.I.P Gygax) and the myriad of other things the conservatives have blamed for the ills of the country. Now it's "terrorism". All they ever do, all they can do, is play the fear card. They need a perpetual war, they don't know how to create anything so they need an enemy at all times to justify their existence.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

7. Here it comes...

the exposed face of Fascism, its ghostly apparition emerging from the cloaking veil of security.

Be afraid. It is not very selective in choosing its victims.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

8. Kick... an important story

[mainegreen]

9. Eventually crap like this might shatter the internet

With places like Europe 'repossessing' addresses, and potentially leading to one address leading to multiple IPs, depending on where you are located on the net.

YAY!
:sarcasm: