The Independent Group’s website and Panama

Skwawkbox have a story highlighting the fact that the whois for the Independent Group has a mention of Panama, and are drawing some slightly silly conclusions as a result. Sadly, I’ve seen people sharing this on social media. I’m going to go through what a whois entry is, why Panama appears there, why this is a nothingburger, and then make a couple of (probably snarky) comments.

What is a whois?

When you set up a website, you have to provide various bits of information. Some of these are technical things (like which IP address a computer that wants to load your webpage should look at to actually get the information). At some point in the past, it was decided that there should also be information about the humans behind the website, in case you need to get in touch with them.

You can do a whois for every website – even this one.

Let’s look at a whois

This is the whois for my university, the University of York. My comments are in italics.

Domain: which website are we looking up?
york.ac.uk
Registered For: who was the website set up for?
University of York
Domain Owner: who owns the domain?
University of York
Registered By: who actually did the registering?
Jisc Services Limited
Servers: where should a browser go to actually find the content?
ns0.york.ac.uk 144.32.128.230
ns0.york.ac.uk 2001:630:61:180::1:e6
ns1.york.ac.uk 144.32.128.231
ns1.york.ac.uk 2001:630:61:180::1:e7
ns2.york.ac.uk 144.32.128.232
ns2.york.ac.uk 2001:630:61:180::1:e8
authdns1.csx.cam.ac.uk
Registrant Contact: who do we get in touch with?
John Mason
Registrant Address: how do we get in touch with them?
IT Services
University of York
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
United Kingdom
+44 1904 323 813 (Phone)
@york.ac.uk
Renewal date: Saturday 7th Sep 2019 when is this domain registered until?
Entry updated: Wednesday 7th June 2017 when was the last change made to this entry?
Entry created: Wednesday 17th September 2003 when was this website registered with this host?

You might notice that the email address is incomplete here.
In this case, there’s only one set of contacts, for the registrant. It’s possible to have other sets of contacts, for admin and tech purposes. If you go to the whois page, you can see that the first part of the email is hostmaster, but it appears as an image, so it’s harder to take the email address for spamming.

Internet naughtiness, oh my!

Spamming isn’t the only naughty thing people do on the internet.

Details like that are also used to steal other people’s identities – sometimes to hijack the website, sometimes for other purposes. It’s become such a problem that ICANN (the people behind the internet… sort of) have considered basically getting rid of public whois.

This seems particularly relevant given the anti-Semitic abuse received by Luciana Berger, and the general unpleasantness and hostility around certain sections of the Labour party at the moment.

There is now a market in whois protection or domain privacy. Basically, this is a service where you can use someone else’s details, and they will pass on any messages to you. Just about every consumer host out there offers it.

So, we now know what a whois is for, what a whois looks like, why people might not want their information on there, and what they can do about it.

So what about Panama?

So, let’s return to the whois entry for the Independent Group.

Registry Registrant ID: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Name: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Organization: WhoisGuard, Inc.
Registrant Street: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant City: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant State/Province: Panama
Registrant Postal Code: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Country: PA
Registrant Phone: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Phone Ext: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Fax: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Fax Ext: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Email: Please query the RDDS service of the Registrar of Record identified in this output for information on how to contact the Registrant, Admin, or Tech contact of the queried domain name.

In order to protect their details, whoever set up the website used a domain privacy service from WhoisGuard. WhoisGuard is based in Panama – I don’t know why – but – this bit’s important – the website is not based in Panama.

Why did they use WhoisGuard, which is based in Panama?

Because it was free.

The website was registered with NameCheap, which is based in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. You can see that at the start of the whois

Domain Name: theindependent.group
Registry Domain ID: cc3acaeaf56243a68e5e3d10fc4af9c1-DONUTS
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: https://www.namecheap.com/

NameCheap offer WhoisGuard for free.

It’s entirely possible that the domain privacy was chosen as it’s a free option, although it’s entirely understandable why anyone would want to keep their details private, and particularly a group likely to be on the end of internet shenanigans and outright abuse. They are also using CloudFlare, a service for dealing with DDoS attacks – look at the name server entries on the whois. There really shouldn’t be a story here.

It became a stupid story because the Skwawkbox didn’t know what a whois is and couldn’t be bothered to find out. Skwawkbox is saying that the Independent Group’s website is set up in Panama, and it isn’t.

They were earlier alleging that the website was set up in 2015, because they didn’t read the date properly.

Skwawkbox haven’t done even the most basic of journalism to find out if there’s a story, because they are a propaganda outlet.

It bothers me that they seem to get stories from the leader’s office, and it bothers me even more that people who should know better are sharing their contemptible nonsense.

While we’re looking at where websites are based, though, we should consider the Skwawkbox’s whois:

Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC
Registrant State/Province: Arizona
Registrant Country: US

Skwawkbox has also taken advantage of a domain privacy service – based in Arizona.