Director Database Marketing (Herndon VA US) (http://www.saic.com/career/jobs/c5

Thu Sep 3 18:51:19 UTC 1998

-----Original Message-----
From: Dean Anderson <dean at av8.com>
To: Tim Salo <salo at networkcs.com>
Cc: nanog at merit.edu <nanog at merit.edu>
Date: Thursday, September 03, 1998 1:41 PM
Subject: Re: Director Database Marketing (Herndon VA US)
(http://www.saic.com/career/jobs/c5

>>o Is focused on whether the whois database is within the purview of
>> the Privacy Act of 1974, but doesn't directly address the ownership
>> of the whois database;
>>
>>o Doesn't discuss the relevance of the FARs, which explicitly talk
>> about the ownership rights of government contractors; and
>>
>>o Says that the NSF asserts that NSI owns the whois database.
>
>Actually, I just read Karls page. The NSF just says it doesn't maintain the
>database and that the database Karl refers to is maintained by NSI, and
>therefore NSF isn't subject to or can't respond to Privacy Act requests on
>this particular database. (The implication here being that NSI might still
>be) Perhaps that is true.
>

I would think that all people interested in
the legal issues of the Registry Industry
would want to study these documents
closely.

http://name.space.xs2.net/law/answers/

In my opinion, the declaration by George Strawn
of the NSF is very misleading. He spends
a lot of time pointing out minutia, fails to
mention significant history, and then draws
conclusions based on technical FUD.

Some of the other letters from Don Mitchell
of the NSF are also critical to the history
here. Don Mitchell works at the NSF for
George Strawn. He has been the Program
Manager for the InterNIC contracts. It is
clear that he has been one of the primary
people responsible for the delays in adding
new TLDs to the legacy Root Name Servers.

Don Mitchell has been responsible for a
variety of actions which favor NSI. For example,
at one point NSI took over the IS tasks of
the InterNIC from General Atomics. Part of
that activity was the Network Scout. When
NSI needed to divest itself of the costs of
the Network Scout to prepare for their IPO,
Don Mitchell approved a $3,000,000 NSF
grant on the day that the Network Scout was
terminated. It remained on the InterNIC web
site. This was essentially an indirect $3M
grant to NSI which did not have to show up
on the books of NSI as additional funding.

http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/showaward?award=9712163

http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/showaward?award=9218749

The NSF has an annual budget of over
$3.8 BILLION dollars. With that amount of
money they can easily manipulate industries
that depend on intellectual property. The
Congress continues to allow them to do
this with apparently no concern about the
negative impacts on society. Apparently,
members of Congress do not understand
the fragile nature of intellectual property or
the service and software based economy
that we now have. If they did, they would not
allow the 900 lb. NSF gorrilla to run free
in these fragile industries.

Jim Fleming
Unir Corporation - http://www.unir.com