For quite a while I've been watching the safety record of certain EADS aircraft and the reliability of EADS as a defense partner of the United States. I started with my occasional CasaCrash blog as sort of an independent observer.
With EADS being much more visible and agressive recently, and more interest in the blogosphere about the French-dominated company, I thought it would be in the public interest to highlight reports alleging corrupt practices by EADS as a modus operandus of its business strategy against American companies.
I got inspired by the excellent new unofficial "Team JCA" blog, for example, and a very funny blog that makes fun of EADS, and created CrookedAirbus.
What influenced me most about starting this blog, though, was when EADS lawyers in Spain intimidated the company that provides privacy for domain name owners with GoDaddy.com, and pressured that company to expose the identity of the owner of www.c295.com. That person had kindly redirected his unused link to my CasaCrash blog. Since EADS jumped in, he removed the link, and I don't blame him.
The C-295 is an aircraft model number that EADS CASA builds in Spain, tried to sell to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, and is now trying to sell to the Pentagon as the new Joint Cargo Aircraft. The EADS lawyers alleged copyright infringement, but they had never sought to secure the domain name for themselves even though the plane has been around for years.
Anyway, the long and short of it is, foreign lawyers can now get away with intimidating American internet service companies to reveal the identities of American citizens who criticize their products and business practices.
A lot of us know that EADS and its Airbus subsidiary are bullies who will commit deeds both legal and illegal to push their business, which is why I started CasaCrash anonymously. I still have to exercise my First Amendment rights under a pseudonym - to keep foreign lawyers of a foreign company owned by the French and Russian governments from trampling my rights as an American citizen. Other bloggers are doing the same. It's pretty sad that our government is using our tax dollars that unintentionally reward EADS for its bully behavior.
