Bill and all, I corrected the spelling in the subject line of your post here from provacy to privacy. I am sure it was fat finger error on your part, I make those all the time. As to the substance of your remarks and statements below I can only say that your correct that there is not good reason for any business to Hide their indentity in Whois records, but there are a number of reasons that certain PII data/information should never appear in a Whois record for any specific Domain name, and those have already been articulated, so I shall not yet again repeat those very good reasons. I take and have taken the same precautions you have for domain names I have or have had by using an OPOC. -----Original Message-----

From: Bill Silverstein <icann-list@sorehands.com> Sent: Apr 8, 2008 10:02 AM To: alac@atlarge-lists.icann.org Subject: [At-Large] Whois provacy

I would have responded to some of this sooner, but I have been busy with a defendants' summary judgment motion, in part against Moniker for providing privacy service to a spammer -- e360Insight.

No LEGITIMATE business hides their identity.

Domain privacy services do not only hide identity, but it can hide quantity and relationships. Ie. A spammer uses 100 domain names to spam with, how do you link them to the one spammer if they use a privacy service? Or, a blogger has the domain name WidgetXpert.com and has a blog that talks about widgets, but it turns out that that blogger is actually the president of one of the companies that makes widgets?

A privacy service may offer privacy of the telephone number and street address (but leave the State, or equivalent, and Country in place). This prevents some of the abuse. There is also a service by the US Postal service (and probably similar elsewhere) called a P.O. Box. which offers this same type of privacy. I use my attorney's office as my address and telephone number for my domain names. There are options here.

I am not law enforcement, I do share my research with the people in the FTC and the AG's office.

As in regards to different privacy laws, I am not aware of any law that prevents one from voluntarily releasing information to the public.

Regards, Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 281k members/stakeholders strong!) "Obedience of the law is the greatest freedom" - Abraham Lincoln "Credit should go with the performance of duty and not with what is very often the accident of glory" - Theodore Roosevelt "If the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B; liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by P: i.e., whether B is less than PL." United States v. Carroll Towing (159 F.2d 169 [2d Cir. 1947] =============================================================== Updated 1/26/04 CSO/DIR. Internet Network Eng. SR. Eng. Network data security IDNS. div. of Information Network Eng. INEG. INC. ABA member in good standing member ID 01257402 E-Mail jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com My Phone: 214-244-4827