Competent Support

posted this elsewhere, but think it fits better here. this is a letter to hostmonster’s owner regarding my situation. if you like it, please send it on… i’d like to see it go viral. damn the man!

Dear Matt,

I am a career journalist and veteran who currently handles public affairs for Multi-National Corps – Iraq in Camp Victory, Baghdad. I have a question for you regarding my situation with Host Monster.

While stationed here, I transferred a personal web domain from 1&1 to your company. I’ve had the domain for years, since I ordered it as a journalism student in New York City. While here, I felt I’d outgrown 1&1’s basic service and heard good things about HM, so I transferred over – quite smoothly, in fact. Yet I was recently notified in an email that, to comply with OFAC sanctions on Iraq, HM is terminating my service, since I ordered it from an Iraq-based IP (which, in fact, is serviced here on Camp Victory by a US government contractor).

Statements by representatives in your billing and abuse departments indicate that this is an issue that has impacted the legitimate Web activities of a number of US servicemembers, civilian employees and contractors based in Iraq. While we all understand the need to limit extremists’ access to Internet audiences, I find it difficult to believe that the law was ever drafted with the intent to limit US servicemens’ access, deprive them of paid services, force them to effectively lose control of their property (i.e. Web domains that cannot be transferred), and effectively treat them like Osama bin Laden.

In fact, I know that’s not the law’s intention. Your company’s communication to me included a link to Treasury’s OFAC site, where anyone can clearly read that the Iraq sanctions, which were eased by 2003 and 2004 executive orders, apply chiefly to oil barons and grave robbers, not to US employees on US facilities working through a US-paid internet service provider, to maintain personal Web sites that are chiefly for communicating with friends, family and employers stateside.

I was conversant with your terms of service before ordering, and seeing as how Uncle Sam himself has set up the IP that I use; how I can walk outside, swing my arms and hit sovereign US soil – in the form of America’s largest embassy abroad; and how jihadists usually don’t come in the form of Jewish Americans from Manhattan – it never occurred to me that your terms meant that patriots such as ourselves would be declared persona non grata. I can assure you that if your application process explicitly barred such IPs from completing a transaction at the point of sale, then I certainly would have gotten the message, and abided by it. Instead, you processed the order, accepted my payment, and only then, weeks later, suspended service.

What I’m writing to ask is that you consider an alternative remedy for people like us. I wholeheartedly agree to a review process that scrutinizes my citizenship and business in Iraq, and that monitors the content of my Web site, then clears it for activity. That is completely legitimate under OFAC rules, I’m sure your legal team will tell you. And the best part is it will cost you nothing more than the opportunity cost of interacting briefly with me and the handful of other servicepersons affected by such suspensions in service.

There is, of course, another alternative – in which I can forward this issue to General Ray Odierno’s Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, which can undertake its own inquiry of: whether your company has misunderstood, misapplied or abused the terms of Iraq’s few remaining economic sanctions: whether US servicemen and civil servants similarly affected have been wronged by your collection of funds and subsequent blanket suspensions; and whether that wronging can be righted by a class action, which of course would come at no cost to the servicemembers affected and would be filed and argued by military lawyers whose daily job it is to advocate for the fair treatment of their Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

To the latter alternative, we could also add arbitration in the court of public opinion. As a media relations expert in the Iraq theater of operations, I am certain that readers of Stars & Stripes, The Associated Press, Reuters, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Washington Times, Washington Post and McClatchy outlets, as well as viewers of the televised news media, would be quite interested in holding forth on the issue of whether your corporation is giving due consideration to servicemen, civilians and contractors who are risking life and limb to make Iraq – and the US – a safer place.

Considerations of legality and patriotism aside, I think the latter alternative is probably less simple or cheap for your company. But of course, it is your company, and it is up to you how to discharge its resources. I would appreciate knowing your mind on this issue, especially since your company intends to delete my service and release my domains into the ether in the next week or so. So please pay me the courtesy of a reply at your earliest convenience.

Very Respectfully