New York Times Reports:
A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears
By ADAM LIPTAK
Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.
The sites, in English, French and Spanish, had been online since 1998. Some, like http://www.cuba-hemingway.com, were literary. Others, like http://www.cuba-havanacity.com, discussed Cuban history and culture. Still others — http://www.ciaocuba.com and http://www.bonjourcuba.com — were purely commercial sites aimed at Italian and French tourists.
“I came to work in the morning, and we had no reservations at all,” Mr. Marshall said on the phone from the Canary Islands. “We thought it was a technical problem.”
It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.
Either way, there is no dispute that eNom shut down Mr. Marshall’s sites without notifying him and has refused to release the domain names to him. In effect, Mr. Marshall said, eNom has taken his property and interfered with his business. He has slowly rebuilt his Web business over the last several months, and now many of the same sites operate with the suffix .net rather than .com, through a European registrar. His servers, he said, have been in the Bahamas all along.
Mr. Marshall said he did not understand “how Web sites owned by a British national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected by U.S. law.” Worse, he said, “these days not even a judge is required for the U.S. government to censor online materials.”
Rest of the article here.
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The Legal Satyricon 
This is a perfectly fine example of the kind of freedom Washington plans to impose on Cuba. And to think the New York Philharmonic has just gone to North Korea.
Cuba remains the only country on the planet for which grown adults, in most cases, must have a permission slip from Washington to go for a visit and see it for themselves.
Mr. Marshall said he did not understand “how Web sites owned by a British national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected by U.S. law.”
Mr. Marshall can now shake hands with Dmitry Skylarov, the Russian programmer who didn’t break any Russian laws and never did any business in the US, and yet got arrested in the US. Or the two BetOnSports executives, neither being a US citizen or resident, who operated a Web site not based in the US and conforming to laws of their home country, who got arrested when they changed planes in the US. When it comes to the Internet, it appears that US is enforcing its laws worldwide.
Yes, this is known as extra-territoriality. Under the Helms-Burton Law, passed in 1996 and signed by President Clinton, US nationals can sue foreign companies who do business in Cuba with entities which were owned by US companies prior to the Cuban Revolution.
This law will affect Barack Obama, should he become President of the United States. Obama says he’s willing to talk to the Cuban government without preconditions. That would be in violation of the Helms-Burton law, which specifies a complete restructuring ot eh Cuban government, including the removal of the Castro brothers from heading it up, as PRECONDITIONS which must be met before any US government can speak to any government in Cuba. In other words, the executive branch is hamstrung in the conduct of foreign policy by this law. Of course, that’s why these regulations were put into place.
Read the relevant section of Helms-Burton here:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c104:1:./temp/~c104n4vKpE:e65500:
FULL LAW HERE:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c104:H.R.927.ENR: