Neil Schwartzman ha scritto:
The vast majority of investigators who man the ramparts in the fight against such things are not law enforcement agencies nor officials, but ad hoc groups and independents such as myself.
I must say that my tiny home SMTP server has been too often unjustly blacklisted in anti-spam tools (usually on the basis of "you use an ISP that we don't like", even if it's one of the major ISPs in my country, or just of "your ISP address is dynamic") for me to be sympathetic to the needs of self-appointed, unauthorized sheriffs of the Internet. In any case, you should be aware that there are people that won't accept to give away a bit of their privacy for a bit less of spam and malware. Specifically, this part:
It is a privilege, not a right.
is quite astonishing: you'd better read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (as well as the Constitutions of many countries and the EU Directives on the matter) before saying this. Privacy is a universally recognized human right, and as such, at least in Europe, people perceive as an insult and a deprivation of rights the suggestion that they should pay for it, as they would do if they had to pay for voting, for basic education, or to get emergency healthcare. How much would it cost is irrelevant. This looks like a fundamental difference in values, and I think that we should just stop trying to prove the other side wrong (see for example:
Moreover the domain name is an entirely optional in the expression of free speech; there are myriad ways in which one can avail oneself of a soapbox that do not require a domain.
- I mean, why do you think that you're entitled to decide for someone else whether his free speech activities would work the same without a domain name?). However, what we could do is to try to find acceptable compromises. For example:
LEA rely on the unique and highly-skilled abilities of amateur investigators *heavily* in their efforts; needless to say 'amateurs' have no ability to get court orders to open the kimono of an obfuscated WHOIS record. Indeed, the courts of the world would become clogged with such requests were investigations even able to get to such a point were amateurs to be unable to do their work, and the additional lag would afford the bad guys extra time to vanish.
I do not think that court orders should necessarily be required to gain access to Whois information. However, I think that there should be an evaluation by public authority. If law enforcement agencies really need cooperation by private parties (and they do), they should be reasonably in touch with them so to be able to help them getting the data when necessary, while at the same time being accountable about what data they disclose. Perhaps, finding acceptable middle ground could be a better way to get out of this deadlock, rather than questioning the legitimacy of each other's requests. -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------