PhillyInc

Courtesy centerforsecuritypolicy.org

As we were saying about the SEC's terrorism Web site ... The agency has been taking heat almost from the moment it put up its site listing all the U.S.-registered companies doing business in countries the State Department has deemed supporters of terrorism. Well, the site is now down, thanks to critics like Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who has complained as loudly as any, saying the information was inaccurate, outdated, misleading, so forth and so on. (Here's the site with an SEC statement in place of the list. And here's the site as it originally appeared, cached by Google.)

Indeed, the implication seemed worse than the evident reality in some cases. At least two Philly-area companies made the list: London-based AstraZeneca P.L.C. (which has North American HQ outside Wilmington) for its sales in Cuba, and Cellegy Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Wayne for apparently seeking patent registration in Sudan. There were hundreds of other companies, most of them foreign-based like AstraZeneca. The SEC looked only at the five countries -- Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Iran -- labeled by the State Department as state-sponsors of terrorism.

SEC Chairman Christopher Cox called the takedown a "temporary suspension." But this sort of criticism doesn't usually leave room for a comeback. Cox even told the AP that the site may never come back, because he said there's enough public ways for investors and analysts to ferret out this information themselves "without need of an SEC-provided Web tool at all.”

So, which financial news service will start posting a "terrorism ticker"? We're not holding our breath, although security groups are already on the case. Here's at least one effort at the Center for Security Policy, which already had compiled a list of state pension investments in suspect countries.

- Thomas Ginsberg