ICANN in, and not in, the news
MB came into my office and said "You should blog about this, ICANN finally getting some cojones, its in today's WaPo." To tell the truths, journal-of-record-coverage-of-ICANN doesn't mean there is anything news worthy happening, and the report by the Security and Stability Advisory Committee is four months post-hoc, and almost 90 pages long, and a problematic work itself, which I may get around to trying to write about for the non-specialist. The SACC document is on the main ICANN website, http://www.icann.org.
One thing the journals-of-record have been silent on that is both ICANN and news is the status of the .iq namespace, which vanished in the buildup to the US-Iraq war.
Here's a story I think is more important. It features John Ashcroft in person and Robert Mueller in person, the US AG and the Director of the FBI. Mueller even made an explicit connection between "9/11" and the arrests when they first happened in 2002. I'll have to dig up that bit of insane drunkenness.
After 26 months in federal custody, the Elashi brothers were convicted of selling computers to a Lebonese broker in Malta, who then sold the computers to Libya and Syria, without first obtaining an export license. This has the look and smell of a harassment case, but a conviction, no matter how absurd, lets Ashcroft and Mueller off the hook for yet-another-careless-political-prosecution.
The connection between the US-Iraq war and some commodity Wintel boxes going from Texas to Malta supporting 26 months of pre-trial detention and up to 10 years of sentencing, is that Bayan Elashi was entrusted by my friend the late Jon Postel to operate the Iraqi national domain name space, the .iq zone -- which winked out of existance and has remained "dark" ever since, because it pleased the United States, and ICANN, that it should.
More after I read the trial record. To be continued.