On 09 May 2011, at 02:31, John R. Levine wrote:
For Internet stuff, they are constantly working in tandem with non-LE people in industry and academia.
This is by no means new, or Internet-specific. LEAs have always relied on ordinary people to provide them information in order to identify and locate criminals. I am fine with that. What I do not want is that domain name suspensions happen outside the LEA framework.
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.
I think it is also safe to say that 99% of the people do not use the WHOIS databases. Maybe we could treat the one percent of those having a need for the WHOIS as an exception. This is, in essence, what Telnic has done for the .tel WHOIS : allow access to clearly identified individuals and entities. Patrick Vande Walle