Wikileaks calls for a global boycott of Enom and Demand Media

INTERNET FREEDOM website Wikileaks has called for a global boycott of domain registrar Enom, its parent company Demand Media, and their owners, executives and all affiliates, interests, holdings, successors, assigns and all heirs and descendents unto the fifth generation [okay, we made that last bit up - Ed].

What triggered Wikileaks ire was that, during its recent legal dustup with Swiss bank Julius Baer, Enom unlawfully locked and seized the Wikileaks.info domain, a Wikileaks.org mirroring website. Furthermore, Enom was also identified in a March 4 New York Times article as having shut down a Spanish travel company for selling flights to Cuba, which is fully legal in Spain.

Because Enom's behaviour was "egregrious and without apology" in both cases, Wikileaks decided to investigate the company. Wikileaks stated that it found that:

"The WIKILEAKS.INFO seizure was not an isolated incident. eNom, Inc. supported by Domain Media, Inc. has engaged in systematic Internet domain censorship and other unethical practices. The censorship is frequently unlawfully and without warning or apology. It is also a flagrant violation of eNom's contract with the international domain name regulatory body ICANN."

In addition, Wikileaks found ICANN meeting minutes in which Enom admitted that it doesn't make even minimal efforts to protect its customers' privacy:

"When complaints are received, we have a very low threshold for turning over the underlying information of the party. Basically anybody mentioning the word copyright or trademark or bought or anything can be sent the underlying contact information.. [they] receive it in response to their initial e-mail."

Enom is the second largest domain registrar with 8.6 million Internet domains, according to Wikileaks.

Even more disturbingly, Wikileaks uncovered a previously secretive proposal by Enom to make all of its Internet domain holders' confidential information easily available to government agents and others. Enom's scheme was to encrypt all of its domain registrants' private information in bulk into "Secure Blobs for Law Enforcement" and attach those to public "whois" records. All of that information would then be automatically available to anyone having a master decryption key.

As Wikileaks sadly observed, Enom is apparently not content to violate the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution but also wants to destroy the 4th Amendment.

Wikileaks has also dug up some interesting information about the principals of Enom and Demand Media.

Demand Media Chairman and and CEO Richard Rosenblatt is characterised by Wikileaks as "...a dot com locust, known for selling out MySpace and boasting of having made 1.3 billion dollars out of the internet, including by 'sniping' domains and ransoming them for profit when people forget to pay the bills...."

Founder of Enom and Chief Strategy Officer of Demand Media Paul Stahura is identified by Wikileaks as the author of the Big Brother's helper -- for a price -- "Secure Blobs for Law Enforcement" proposal.

Something tells us that Enom and Demand Media might come to regret having picked on Wikileaks. µ

L'INQ
Wikileaks