Mr. Beckman  - 

As noted by Mark Foster below, the listed contact information for the DoD 
address blocks is indeed correct, and (as you yourself confirmed) may be used 
to successfully contact the organization.  ARIN does not have the mandate to 
force any organization “to deal” with any other, but I can assure you that the 
contacts listed for the resources in the ARIN registry have been used to 
resolve actual technical problems without any difficultly. 

Best wishes,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers


> On 25 Apr 2021, at 6:11 AM, Mark Foster <blak...@blakjak.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi Mel,
> 
> I'd expect ARIN to hold them to account for complying with ARIN rules, if 
> they are subject.  In years gone by, I have been able to contact US DoD 
> organisations using published contact methods to address technical issues. So 
> even if there's technical non-compliance (which i'd agree should be 
> addressed), it could be a lot worse.
> 
> As for the DoD's accountability via your system of government, my view would 
> be that instead of bogon-filtering addresses legitimately appearing in your 
> BGP, with the justification being "they havn't before!", you could consider 
> asking them via channels. Like 
> https://open.defense.gov/transparency/foia.aspx for example.  But i'm not a 
> citizen of the United States, so will happily plead ignorance as to whether 
> this is likely to lead you to what you want to know or not.
> 
> In my country the government is also accountable to the people. But that 
> doesn't mean I would expect an Internet Service Provider to deliberately 
> sabotage the network access of their customers, either. Starts to feel like a 
> net neutrality argument again.
> 
> Mark.
> 
> PS: If DoD make use of IP address space that they legitimately hold, i'm not 
> sure you can call it a civilian resource, despite it interacting with 
> civilian counterparts.  Any consumable held by a military organisation is a 
> military resource and they'll make use of it based on their operational 
> requirements. The best comparison I could think of, would be fuel 
> (gasoline/petroleum/diesel/Jet-A1), all of which has both military and 
> civilian application.
> 
> On 25/04/2021 7:40 pm, Mel Beckman wrote:
>> Mark,
>> 
>> ARIN rules require every IP space holder to publish accurate — and effective 
>> —  Admin, Tech, and Abuse POCs. The DOD hasn’t done this, as I pointed out, 
>> and as you can test for yourself. Your expectation that the DOD will 
>> “generally comply with all of the expected norms” is sorely naive, and 
>> already disproven.
>> 
>> As far as “why does anyone on the Internet need to publish to your arbitrary 
>> standards”, you seem to forget that in the U.S., the government is 
>> accountable to the People. Where a private company may not have to explain 
>> its purposes, the government most certainly does in the private sector. With 
>> these IP spaces being thrust into the civilian realm, yes, they owe the 
>> citizenry an explanation of their actions, just as they would if they had 
>> started mounting missile launchers on highway overpasses. It’s a direct 
>> militarization of a civilian utility.
>> 
>> Keep in mind that the U.S. Government — under all administrations — has 
>> shown that it will abuse every technical advantage it can, as long as it can 
>> do so in secret. Perhaps you’ve forgotten James Clapper, the former director 
>> of national intelligence, who falsely testified to Congress that the 
>> government does “not wittingly” collect the telephone records of millions of 
>> Americans. And he was just the tip of the iceberg. Before Clapper under 
>> Obama there was the Bush administration’s Stellar Wind" warrantless 
>> surveillance program. The list of government abuse of civilian resources is 
>> colossal .
>> 
>> Fighting against that isn’t political. It’s patriotic.
>> 
>>  -mel
>> 
>>> On Apr 25, 2021, at 12:02 AM, Mark Foster <blak...@blakjak.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On 25/04/2021 3:24 am, Mel Beckman wrote:
>>>> This doesn’t sound good, no matter how you slice it. The lack of 
>>>> transparency with a civilian resource is troubling at a minimum. I’m going 
>>>> to bogon this space as a defensive measure, until its real — and detailed 
>>>> — purpose can be known. The secret places of our government have proven 
>>>> themselves untrustworthy in the protection of citizens’ data and networks. 
>>>> They tend to think they know “what’s good for” us.
>>>> 
>>>>  -mel
>>>> 
>>> Why does anyone on the Internet need to publish to your arbitrary 
>>> standards, what they intend to do with their IP address ranges?
>>> 
>>> Failure to advertise the IP address space to the Internet (until now, 
>>> perhaps) doesn't make the address space any less legitimate, and though I'd 
>>> expect the DoD to generally comply with all of the expected norms around 
>>> BGP arrangements and published whois details, at the end of the day, they 
>>> can nominate who should originate it from their AS and as long as we can 
>>> see who owns it.... it's just not our business.
>>> 
>>> Any organisation who's used DoD space in a way that's likely to conflict 
>>> with, well, the DoD, gambled and lost.
>>> 
>>> Mark.
>>> 

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