Rosa Miriam Elizalde: OFAC BLACKLIST OF CUBA-ASSOCIATED WEBSITES

[magbana]

This is an article that Elizalde wrote in March 2008 and is being re-published today. I can't find the original NYT article, but will keep looking. In the meantime, her comments are quite pertinent to discussion on this list about the US, Cuba and the Internet.

magbana

CUBADEBATE
Margin note for The New York Times
By Rosa Miriam Elizalde

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2419.html
A CubaNews translation by Giselle Gil
Edited by Walter Lippmann

2008-03-01

OFAC Blacklist of Cuba associated websites

The New York Times is correct in saying that the decision to apply
regulations, which even in the States are legally dubious, in the Internet
to all countries is € ¦’³scandalous€ ¦’´. This is an excellent note, but it leaves
out information that can help people understand why the censorship to .com
websites is only the tip of the iceberg of the aggressions against Cuba in
the internet.

How many .com websites associated with Cuba are in the Treasury Department
black list?

Going over the OFAC blacklist with Asian patience we found 557 blacklisted
companies and 3,719 websites which have been blocked without previous
warning. To get an idea of what this means you can check the Latin American
domain list at www.latinoamericann.org . Cuba has 1,434 .cu domains
registered in this website. This means that the United States has blocked
almost three times more sites than the ones Cuba has registered with our
identification.

What is eNom, the company that blocked Mr. Marshall€ ¦’²s websites?

eNom Inc is the second largest domain registering company in the world. It
is credited by the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers), a supposedly independent corporation to bring order to the net.
ICANN designates domain names and numbers, something similar to postal
districts but in the Internet.

Can the United States block the whole Internet?

This is additional proof that the United States controls the cyberspace
access not only of its own citizens, but also of all internet users.
Although there is a lot of talk about free internet access world wide, the
ICANN depends on the Department of Commerce and American regulations. This
was proven when they violated their own rules without protest. Their
intervention in websites is supposedly technical only. They cannot censor
sites, nor approve or disprove legal or political policies. If there is a
claim on property rights it should be presented at an international
refereeing court. Nevertheless, eNom, which is attached to this corporation
and has its same functions, not only followed a United States government
decision that violates the laws and regulations of other countries, but, it
did so without notifying the persons and companies involved as The New York
Times rightly points out. This fact proves that the United States controls
the main international servers and that in practice, it can block anything
it likes on the web, without even the excuse of a terrorist attack.

What law does the United States government invoke to violate the sovereignty
of our country and of all other countries using the Internet?

It is the so-called Torricelli Law or the Law of authorization of national
defense for the fiscal year 1992. This law authorized our satellite
connection to the web under the condition that every megabyte had to be
under contract to an American company or subsidiary and approved by the
Treasury Department. This law establishes limitations to contracts and
decides extraordinary sanctions € ¦’¶ 50 thousand dollar fines for each
violation € ¦’¶ for those inside or outside the US who favor the island
economically. This has been followed very rigorously and little by little
the OFAC has been adding names to the blacklist until it has reached the
proportions that The New York Times has reported.

By the way, this office has more people working on finding out who travels
or sends money to Cuba than the ones tracking down possible terrorist
funding transactions. In April 2004, OFAC informed Congress that four of its
120 employees were tracking Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein finance
trails, while almost two dozen were busy reinforcing the embargo against
Cuba. They admitted using the Internet to follow money trails.

What can one do?

The Intellectual Property World Organization establishes that any person in
the world can take legal action with respect to any dominion name registered
under .com, .net or .org. Article 4 of ICANN states that you can take
abusive registering or censorship of a dominion name to an international
refereeing court, which of course has to be proved. Thanks to this note in
The New York Times and the opinions of all the specialists the writer
interviewed now there are 3,719 censorship claims that can be made against
the United States. Who wants to go first?

ORIGINAL:http://www.cubadebate.cu/index.php?tpl=design/especiales.tpl.html&n
ewsid_obj_id=14981