Now, the fact that LEAs may not be efficient in fighting crime, especially in an international context, is no reason to build a parallel enforcement system run entirely by the private sector with no accountability to the rest of the society.
I get the impression you aren't very familiar with the way that law enforcement works. For Internet stuff, they are constantly working in tandem with non-LE people in industry and academia. I work with them in mailing lists, occasionally on the phone, and face to face at conferences. Now and then I testify in court. For obvious reasons I can't discuss the details, but the idea that there is a Chinese wall between LE and non-LE, and that non-LE don't use WHOIS info to assist LE is laughable. I think we all agree that natural people have privacy rights. But about 99% of domains are not registered by natural people, which makes it obvious that the right way to hande the ones that are registered by natural people is as exception cases. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly