I disagree with the way Slack handled this, but by now it’s clear (even the original poster seems to have realised) that Slack banned everyone who accessed the service from an Iranian IP, irrespective of who they were or where they were from.
It’s pretty clear that’s it not motivated by race or any kind of profiling.
Slack has no incentive to boot more people off their platform than necessary, so this overly broad ban could be a result of either misunderstanding the US governments mandate, or that might be just what they were asked to do.
Who asked them to do this ? I have serious doubts that this action was directly recommended in any official government communication otherwise we would have had someone leak it and debate about it. My hunch is this isn't directed by a national security letter or anything like that with mandated secrecy otherwise we would see similar actions from other tech service providers. As far as I know Facebook isn't deleting the accounts of everyone who has connected from Iran or Syria. My suspicion is that this is the result of a shoddy communication between the legal department and some coders and I suspect that Slack will be stuck in a hard place explaining it and justifying it. As far as I know there was no official explanation or blog post, the suade velvet secret slack police just started causing people to disappear in the night. It will also be hard for them to walk back this action because they have set at least an internal precedent and opened themselves and other companies up to attack by opportunistic regulators if they now say they were wrong.
This is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't done business with the Federal government, but your visions of national security letters are very much on one end of a broad spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum is the mundane.
The mundane includes things like contracting with the Federal government or even certain government contractors. Our company just contracted with PAE, and PAE contractors must agree to much of the same Federal Acquisition Regulations as someone doing business directly with the Federal government. One of the vendor forms was 37 pages long, and it contains sections explicitly requiring certifications that your company will comply with sanctions. The form binds the signer to personal culpability for failure.
So if you're a company contracting in this process you're tasked with preventing delivery of your product to Iran, and the Federal government gets to set the bar, not you. If you fail to meet the bar, you end up in Michael Flynn's shoes, only far less public. How long of a bet is it to expect a Federal bureaucrat will interpret compliance the same way you do? Are you willing to risk inquiry if your opinions differ?
I don't like what's happening here. I don't like it at all, but I know just enough about dealing with the Federal government that I can smell the odor from here.
It's not inconceivable that Slack's general counsel saw the headlines about Trump campaign officials being investigated for circumventing Iranian sanctions, evaluated their position, and recommended this action just to be safe.
Except it isn’t because of ethnicity. There are thousands of people from Iranian descent that use Slack in the US each day and they aren’t getting banned. Nor has anyone else been banned “because of their ethnicity.” That is absolutely ludicrous. The guy who was banned is being banned for something beyond his ethnicity.
That's not what happened at all, that's why it's hard to take him seriously. He makes it look like Slack went out of their way to look at all of their users and check of what race they are to ban those who are Iranians, when they just made a geoip check.
If they're just doing GeoIP checking, wouldn't it have made more sense for them to just block access from those countries, which would be an inconvenience to their users, instead of retroactively removing their accounts?
> That's not what happened at all ... when they just made a geoip check ...
It sounds as though you have access to data that the rest of people on HN do not. Would you care to share your source? Are you certain he would not have been banned by Slack if he were not an Iran citizen (just Canadian) but would have (possibly) used Slack when travelling to Iran?
Assuming that for some reason I should take your word over his, banning for "having logged on in Iran at some point" is, effectively, banning for ethnicity.
It only is if you think someone who has ever set foot on Iran is an ethnic Irani. You just have to look at this HN thread to see that is false, as this problem also applies to other embargoed countries.
> It only is if you think someone who has ever set foot on Iran is an ethnic Irani.
We're both adults here and I assume we both can realize that splitting these hairs doesn't make my statement that banning everyone that's ever logged on Iran from slack is, in effect, a ban on Iranian ethnic users?
No it’s not. There are millions of Persians in the US that haven’t been to since the 1970s. Those are of the same ethnicity as someone living in Tehran. There are millions of Persians living in Europe as well — also ethnic “Iranian” who would be unaffected by a geo-ban.
So no, a ban based on signing in from a specific locale has zero to do with ethnicity or race.
On one hand, yes, but it's fair because it's an embargoed country. I mean, it's not fair in my opinion, but Slack is forced to abide by the laws of the United States. This approach they've chosen of banning everybody who's ever connected from Iran is stupid and ham-fisted and they are being rightly ridiculed for it.
On the other, the author of the thread is accusing Slack of profiling him racially. What he's implying is that a human proceeded to stalk him around the Internet, on social networks, etc to check if he is an actual Iranian and ban him based on that. And that is a very, very grave accusation.
