Comment of The Day: Who’s Your GoDaddy?

A letter to the Guardian about the recent UK bombings caught my eye this morning and led me in an unexpected direction: to Bob Parsons, GoDaddy CEO and larger-than-life internet personality. Here’s the letter:

You report on an internet forum – al-Hesbah – which featured a pre-emptive message telling Islamists to “Rejoice, by Allah, London shall be bombed” (The message boards of militant chatter, July 2). The only problem is that the al-Hesbah chat room is registered with a domain-registration company in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it is one that hides the identity of the original registrar. Does anyone besides me find it strange that after tracking back various “terrorist” websites to places like Texas and Virginia, all of a sudden Domains by Proxy starts up to provide “terrorist” websites with anonymity, and despite the hue and cry against anyone who supports terror and the USA Patriot Act, Domains By Proxy isn’t investigated, harassed, raided or for that matter even mentioned in the media as an obvious facilitator of the “terrorist” websites?

MA Vidal
Hermanus, South Africa

I was intrigued: who or what’s Al-Hesbah and why Scottsdale?

Al-Hesbah is an Arabic message board and has been called “one of the most widely used jihadist Internet forums. In March 2006, the site was accused by rival Jihadist forum of aiding in the arrest of the well-known cyber-persona of Irhabi 007, a representative of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. This led to the site administrators shutting down the site on March 26, stating that they had discovered the identities of two members of the site who were actual security officers, Muhammad al-Zuhayri and Muhammad Tamallat,

[…]

On June 29, 2007, the site was found to have a warning possibly related to the failed 2007 London car bombs in London, England.

Not content with unsupported assertion, I whoised El Hasbah, and this is their registration entry:

Registry Whois

Domain Name: al-hesbah.org

Status: CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED, CLIENT RENEW PROHIBITED, CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED, CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED

Registrar: Wild West Domains, Inc. (R120-LROR)

Expiration Date: 2008-04-15 14:06:18
Creation Date: 2004-04-15 14:06:18
Last Update Date:2007-05-10 09:27:05

Name Servers:
ns1.cpmax.net
ns2.cpmax.net

A quick google for Wild West Domains, Inc tells us it’s an ICANN registrar that tracks back to GoDaddy, who also own ‘domains by proxy’.

Domains by Proxy is an Internet company owned by Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons, that offers private domain registration to its users. Ordinarily, the domain owner’s contact information is listed in the WHOIS database. Using one of their partner registrars such as Go Daddy or Wild West Domains, Domains by Proxy leaves their information instead, guaranteeing some amount of privacy to the domain owner. This means that it is impossible for spammers to harvest your email address from the WHOIS database. It also means that domain owners have, in theory, a lot more privacy.

On the other hand, it could mean a longer process to trace the activities back to the responsible owner if the domain is used for illegal or unwanted activities, such as spamming.

However, this is not true anonymity. Personal information is collected by these registrars to provide the service. By some accounts, registrars like Domains by Proxy take little persuasion to release so-called ‘private’ information to the world, requiring only a phone request or cease and desist letter.

Actually they’re a little more cagy than that. From the subpoena policy:

Upon the receipt of a valid civil subpoena, Domains by Proxy will promptly notify the customer whose information is sought via e-mail or U.S. mail. If the circumstances do not amount to an emergency, Domains by Proxy will not immediately produce the customer information sought by the subpoena and will provide the customer an opportunity to move to quash the subpoena in court.

[…]

Domains by Proxy will not produce the content of e-mail, as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. §2701 et seq., prohibits an electronic communications service provider from producing the contents of electronic communications, even pursuant to subpoena or court order, except in limited circumstances. Domains by Proxy ‘s e-mail servers do not retain deleted or sent e-mail. However, deleted e-mail may be recoverable from back-up servers for a period of up to thirty (30) days.

Domains by Proxy reserves the right to request a copy of the complaint and any supporting documentation that demonstrates how the Domains by Proxy e-mail address is related to the pending litigation and the underlying subpoena.

If British police are trying to track back the registrant they’re not going to have an easy job of it – which is rather the point.

Who is Bob Parsons? Bob Parsons is a man with a big presence online who has strong opinions about privacy and the internet: it would be safe to say he’s a strong libertarian and free-marketeer: you could even describe him as neoliberal. He likes to think of hinself of something of a maverick and an internet watchdog; his blog is very popular and he has a radio show too, in which he presents himself as ‘the voice of internet freedom.

[…] he uses his blog and his radio show, which airs live on Wednesday nights on Sirius (Charts) and XM Radio (Charts), as his soapbox. He rants about issues that he argues are critical to the Internet overall but obviously are of huge importance to his company.

This is what he says about private registrations:

Registrants who purchase private registrations have no problem with accountability.

In contract, those who seek privacy are fine receiving it with accountability. Law abiding citizens have no problem being held accountable for their actions. This is because, well, they are law abiding. So when people pay for private domain registrations they typically send three messages. The first message is that they are law abiding citizens; the second message is that they are willing to be held accountable for their actions; and the third and most important message, is that the registration information they are providing is valid.

Law abiding Americans are entitled to privacy.

[My emphasis]

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he, since he’s presumably making money from successful private registration companies?

But anonymity, sorry, privacy, isn’t only useful for the ‘good guys’ and money’s money, online or off. It’s an industry that’s made Parsons has very well-off and well-connected; Bob Parsons has clout in US government circles. or or if not clout exactly, certainly an entree:

I flew to Washington D.C. late Monday evening to meet Tuesday with newly-appointed assistant Secretary of Commerce John Kneur who is also the Director of The National Telecommunications Administration (“NTIA”). The NTIA is the branch of the U.S. Government that oversees ICANN. And since ICANN is primarily responsible for the domain name system, when the possibility presented itself for me to meet with Assistant Secretary Kneuer, I jumped at the opportunity.

The purpose was to meet Secretary Kneuer and to discuss face-to-face his general plans for ICANN and the Internet. Since there has been quite a lot of talk and fear about the governance of the Internet moving to the United Nations, I was quite interested to talk to Secretary Kneuer.

Sounds like he and the Bush appoiintee are pretty sympatico:

I am happy to report that Secretary Kneur firmly supports ICANN and is committed to private sector management of the Internet. He confirmed that the NTIA will firmly support the complete transition of ICANN from DOC control to private sector control, a move that the International Community has been supporting for quite some time. He, like me and most other people I know, does not wish to see control over the Internet fall into the hands of the U.N. or the ITU. But, we were both happy to hear the ITU announce a few days ago that they have no intention of taking on the Internet as one more issue on their already full plate. So, I was seriously encouraged by that news.

Isn’t that nice.The person who gives, for a price, terrorist organisations the means to communicate anonymously, hugger-mugget with the US assistant secretary of commerce responsible for the regulation of those very digital communications. How very cosy.

Secretary Kineuer is a former telcoms industry lobbyist for the big phone companies, and is of a distinctly libertarian slant too:

Kneuer is a member of the camp of neo-cons who categorically refuse to “even *think* about regulation to promote competition,” writes Harold Feld of Media Access Project.

To prop up their ideology they enthuse over the wonders of the free market, conveniently overlooking reams of data that show a balance of sound public policy and market forces to be the engine driving the Web’s real successes.

Kneuer and his industry comrades try to drown out evidence of market failure with pseudo-libertarian talking points about deregulation, free markets and competition. By mouthing this propaganda they provide cover for the phone companies that Web guru Cory Doctorow calls “corporate welfare bums” — creatures of government regulations that base their businesses on “government-granted extraordinary privileges.”

Which brings us back to Bob Parsons again. I do find it odd that that his private registration companies aren’t under some kind of investigation if they’re hosting alleged jihadist sites. If they’re not, why not? It’s not exactly difficult to find out to find out which registrants are hosting sites like El-Hasbah and others like it. If I can do it, anyone can. But that in itself is suspicious, like the trail’s been put there on purpose. It’s been alleged that El-Hasbah is a false flag operation could there be more like it, hosted by private registration companies? Exactly how sympatico is proud Vietnam vet Parsons with the Bush administration and federal security agencies? Well he was fully behind Guantanamo Bay which got him a lot of negative reaction; suddenly he started coming over all cloak and dagger:

The soapbox crusades make him a hero to some; to others they are just more of the grandstanding that has made Parsons a sometimes polarizing figure. His ads generate hate mail accusing him of promoting pornography. He knows full well that the safari to Zimbabwe he went on in October, in which he killed an elephant, will cause some outcry. But does he really need bodyguards?

When Parsons attended a conference called the Domain Roundtable in May 2005, he showed up with two beefy guys. They even came a week in advance to case the joint. “They were looking for where to rush the man if anything went wrong,” says Jay Westerdal, who runs research firm Name Intelligence and puts on the Seattle conference.

What does all this mean? Who knows?

There are circular connections to be made between virtually any US corporate CEO and members of the Bush administration – so this may be nothing at all. It probably isn’t anything at all. There may be a story there, there may not – but whatever else, it’s always interesting to observe the little junctions where ibertarian wingnuttia, freemarketeering, Bushco and the spooks collide.