John Levine said: "The problem is that the pro-crime crowd keep demanding that all the rest be anonymous or effectively anonymous, too."
Exactly! Also, like some who are arguing against Neil Sw. on this, I too consider myself to be a very strong privacy advocate too. However what we currently have is ALREADY "the compromise" between privacy and accountability. Already , anyone who desires can have a private hidden Whois registration. But anyone who does so would need to know that there is a chance that their email will have a little bit higher percentage chance of being blocked in comparison to not having a private Whois registration (specifically, having a truthful Whois!). However if that person is doing everything else very well, then such problems are unlikely to happen. Three scenarios for having a private registration for non-criminal means have been provided. (1) The first one involves a political dissident living in a totalitarian regime. However that person would be a fool to try to run their own email with their own domain name because there would be too many moving parts... There would be providers who could be subpoenaed or forced by governments to give up that person's information. They would be much better off if they paid for an email account with email service that is specifically set up to provide anonymity and encryption and protection from governments, most likely not even using their own domain name for that email. I was reading about one such service based out of Switzerland the other day. (3) another scenario is a product launch that needs to be secret. That is understandable. However if they are doing everything else correctly and not sending unsolicited bulk email, it is very unlikely that their messages would go into the spam filter based on a private Whois alone. Also, that company can always update their Whois seconds after they launch their product. (3) the third scenario is a private individual wanting to keep his information Anonymous so as to prevent spam and solicitations from coming to that person. While that is understandable, such a person would need to live with the fact that their domain and their outgoing email is going to get a little bit less respect, all else being equal. It is insane to solve this problem by forcing everyone to be anonymous since that idea will provide aid and comfort to the spammers and criminals. If this individual is not sending unsolicited bulk email, then they will probably have very few problems on the basis of an anonymous Whois by itself, if any! But if there are any problems, then that is simply the price they have to pay for being anonymous. This is a lesser of evils... by order of magnitudes.... over the free pass that making all whois anonymous... would give to criminals Furthermore, making all Whois anonymous also has the negative side effect of preventing legitimate organizations from getting full credit for the good reputation they have worked hard to build up, as they played by the rules. Forcing all Whois to be anonymous tears that down, which is not fair to those companies who played by the rules. For example, with my own anti spam Blacklist, I often factor in Whois data into my whitelisting decisions. It sometimes helps me to know for positive that a newly registered domain name belongs to a legitimate organization. Forcing Universal Anonymous Whois would remove that tool from my system, thus harming good organizations. Basically what is amazing here... is that so many who are arguing for Universal Anonymous Whois.. are acting as if they were arguing against a system where private Whois registrations had already been outlawed for all this time. That is the way they talk. But the compromise they keep saying that they want.. is what we already have since Anonymous Whois is already allowed. Again, if someone using an anonymous Whois in the current system is penalized in some way then that is a lesser of evils when compared to the free pass that a universal Anonymous Whois system would give to criminals. Most of the people in this debate who are arguing my point of view are speaking from long experience of working in the anti abuse industry hands-on... some of them on a daily basis... And some of them have moved mountains to make the internet more safe. It is sad that their concerns would be so easily blown off by so many people who themselves have so greatly benefited from the work of these respected individuals. In contrast, most of the people arguing for allowing Universal Anonymous Whois don't have a clue how much of a free pass that would give to criminals. They also fail to understand that activity on the internet is not the same thing as activity confined to the privacy of your own property. Activity on the Internet is more similar to driving a car down the street and being expected to obey traffic laws and being expected to have a driver's license and registration. -- Rob McEwen Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Droid _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
