WHois and data mining

[Chris Chiu]

I'm disturbed by the terms of reference. It sounds as if the task force is actually designed to guarantee wholesale access to sensitive registrant information without calling it bulk access: 

"The task force must ensure that groups such as law enforcement,
intellectual property, internet service providers, and consumers can
continue to retrieve information necessary to perform their functions.
In some cases this may require the provision of searching facilities
(e.g that can return more than one record in response to a query) as
well as look-up facilities (that only provide one record in response to
a query)."

"Privacy" is not even mentioned in the terms of reference!

Sincerely,
Christopher Chiu
Technology Policy Analyst
American Civil Liberties Union


-----Original Message-----
From: Milton Mueller [mailto:Mueller at SYR.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2003 6:44 PM
To: NCUC-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: [NCUC-DISCUSS] WHois and data mining



The forwarded email contains the proposed terms of reference for the task force on restricting whois data use for marketing purposes. This task force was assigned high priority by the Council. Please read it and let me know what you think.