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Office of Foreign Asset – Specially Designated Nationals List
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October 3rd, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
The United States Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) made an update to their list of Specially Designated Nationals (SDN’s) with whom engaging in trade or provisions of services is a federal felony. The SDN list is separate from the country sanction programs also administered by OFAC. The organizations that own these domains names are not allowed to do business with the US companies. Because the registries of these domains (Verisign and PIR) along with the ICANN registrars both have names on this list they will be forced to take some action against the domain owners that have been listed.
Now on to bigger things, how about IP addresses? If these companies use IP addresses, can those allocations be taken from them?
The full list of SDN’s is located here:
http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sdn/sdnlist.txt
Thanks to John Berryhill a Domain Industry Lawyer for pointing this out.
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Posted in US Government, Verisign |
3 Comments »
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:13 PM
Whoa. Hold on there before you get yourself in a tizzy.
This is a subject I am very familiar with and don’t mind saying in public that I own over 2000 Cuba related domain names.
What’s going on here is that the OWNER of the domain names is on the SDN list NOT the domain names themselves.
The OWNER of the domains is a Canadian with his operations based in Cuba. So, there’s the potential violation. If the funds are coming from Canada I doubt that OFAC can really raise too much of a stink.
Also, there’s no jail time. OFAC will send out a request for more information (a document that forces you to self incriminate yourself).
The day my government tells me that I can’t own ANY domain is the day that WE ARE ALL in trouble.
So, I will dig into this and watch it closely but I wouldn’t worry if you own Cuba domains.
Rob Sequin
Publisher
Havana Journal Inc. (a Massachusetts corporation)
PS Jay, I am a little concerned about your sensationalism lately. The other day you said Snapnames was going to die. Relax man, relax. The sky is not falling.
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:32 PM
More.
When you do self-incriminate yourself for violating the Cuba sanctions, then you get a request to appear, pretty much like a traffic violation. Fines are then discussed and negotiated.
In most cases you have to do something seriously wrong to get noticed by OFAC.
The other little known thing about OFAC (last numbers I heard a couple years ago) more people and resources were being allocated from OFAC to look into Cuba sanctions violations than were allocated to find Osama bin Laden money.
So, you have to dig deep to really understand the foolishness of OFAC specifically and the Cuban Embargo in general.
As you can see, I don’t mind expressing my free speech with words AND DOMAIN NAMES.
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