whois.nic.gov doesn't respond?

[Jim Reid]

> I'm trying to whois "donotcall.gov" from several computers and the 
> query
> just times out...is there are reason whois.nic.gov doesn't respond 
> like a
> security issue?

The whois servers for most TLDs are subject to sustained abuse: denial 
of service attacks, torrents of queries from cyberspammers looking for 
newly expired domain names to re-register, etc. etc. It may well be 
that your attempts to contact whois.nic.gov are failing because of this 
sort of traffic.

BTW this list discusses DNS issues related to BIND, not whois servers.