US Government Fights User Privacy in DNS

I do not understand the fuss. Anonymous domains help exactly nobody.

Among other things I do network security for a living. The internet is so incredibly full of criminals hiding behind anonymous accounts, domains and servers it's breathtaking. Yes, there is the occasional whistleblower or human rights group, but for every one of these there are hundreds, even thousands of spammers, phishers, swindlers, con men, carders, crackers, every despicable filth you can imagine. We have, again, reached a state where we can not, in good conscience, recommend our parents to connect to the internet - it's just too dangerous out there. Even organized crime gangs have entered the fray, big time. Instead of creating the often quoted global village we created the global crime district.

I've been on the net since 1990. The openness of the global village we were all fascinated with and motivated by depended, to a serious degree, on everybody knowing their neighbour. Whois is one of the last remaining cornerstomes of that philosophy. Instead of trying to kill it, we should strengthen it, requiring truthfull entries and checks by registrars and registries alike, requiring proof of identity with new domains, true names, true and serveable addresses, correct email and phone contacts.

One excuse for the privacy crusade against Whois, obviously, is the small guy. Him, oppressed by $bigmegacorporation do we offer an escape into anonymity. But, of course, this is nonsense, like treating hunger with pain killers. Instead of offering him an escpae route we should offer him a legal system that allows him to make a stand for his beliefs. Yes, Mr. Law Professor, that mostly means fixing horribly broken law systems around the world - including, most prominently, yours - that allow large entities to buy justice by bankrupting their opponents, and by countless similar tactics that are symptomatic for law systems that were tuned for the disputes between equals, and now fail horribly (or by design) when big guys try to (mass-)fry small fish.

Regards

Christoph Weber-Fahr

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:A differing view
by KarlAuerbach on Thursday February 17 2005, @12:36AM (#14657)
User #3243 Info | http://www.cavebear.com/

You may feel that your privacy is worth sacrificing - that is properly your own choice to make.

However, many of the rest may chose otherwise.

What you are arguing is that your choice should be imposed on us all.

Sure there are criminals and nasty folks - and there are well established legal processes to obtain the business records that are useful to map a domain name into a contact.

If you believe that your rights are being offended by someone on the net, then you can crank up the legal machinery, articulate a claim and support it with facts, and if a judge agrees that you have demonstrated an adequate claim, then you will be able to open up the cookie jar. But if you can not make such a showing, then that jar should remain closed to you.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

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