Hello all,

I would like to introduce an additional use case. This is just a rough draft for now, and I welcome your feedback on how this use case can be strengthened. 

The scenario is: a dissident group launches a website to bring important news and information to the public. They register their domain name in a foreign nation and do not want law enforcement, or other parties, to be able to identify the website’s administrators, management, and/or sources of information. If this information was made known, their publishing could be silenced and their sources and contributors could suffer harm. The registrant is not aware of the existence of privacy proxy services at the time they register their domain name.

Misuse Case: The RDS could be used by State actors or other parties to identify members of or contributors to the dissident group, and this could result in their voices being silenced through legal, political, or physical means.

Main Misuse Case: An actor is unhappy that a website in a country is publishing material that speaks unfavourably about a given topic. They wish to launch political and legal attacks to silence the website’s publishers and to alter the narrative of the historical record on this topic. They thus utilise the RDS to identify a contact of someone involved in the administration of this website, with the view of torturing or otherwise extracting from this contact the names and contact details of contributors to the dissenting website. As the registrant does not subscribe to a privacy proxy service (possibly because of limited financial resources, or lack of awareness that such a service exists), their contact details have been permanently published into the public record and their privacy is thus permanently breached. As a result the RDS threatens the ability of dissenting voices to exercise their inalienable rights in an online environment. 

Primary Actor: Government or other entity wanting to censor a dissident group.

Other stakeholders: Domain name registrant.

Data Elements: In order to prevent misuse by another actor, no personally identifiable information should be stored in the RDS whatsoever. The only data elements that the RDS requires to operate on a technical level are: the domain name itself, the registrar, the domain name’s expiry date, and its status (registered / not registered). For it to be of functional use, there are two optional fields: name servers, and the auth-code.

Privacy implications: Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. These principles must be upheld in the RDS. An RDS that contains any personally-identifiable information would threaten these very freedoms. Accordingly, the RDS must only collect and store data for limited, lawful, and appropriate purposes.

 

How data can be accessed: At this time, personally identifiable information can be accessed by any party in the world, for any reason. This is not consistent with best practices in privacy protection.

 

 

As you can see, I have left a few of the fields in Lisa's template for use cases blank. I do not have all the answers, so I would very much welcome your suggestions on how this use case could be strengthened. I'm still a little uncertain as to whether we are designing use cases for what the WHOIS protocol is like today (this is an assumption I have gone by in this first draft) or if this is meant to be more like a use case in a dream system instead. I'll revise this use case once I understand this exercise a bit better.

Thank you for your time, consideration, and feedback.

Best wishes,

Ayden Férdeline