Discussion of Cybersafety Constituency

[Milton L Mueller]

Prof. Clifford,
I don't think its true that either ICANN in general or this constituency has ignored safety online. 
One of the key factors sustaining NCUC's interest in the Whois issue since 2000 (yes, that would be 9 years ago) was identity theft and the exposure of individual's sensitive personal contact information to indiscriminate use by spammers, stalkers and overreaching trademark lawyers. You might take a look at the documents we produced on that as well as the report by SSAC confirming that publication of your email address in the Whois service leads to its incorporation into spam lists. 

Recently, perhaps either just before you joined or just after, we were involved in the consideration of DNSSEC (which may protect the DNS against certain forms of insecurity and spoofing), and considered the issue of fast-flux domains, which can be used by phishers.  
In many of these cases, we lacked the human resources to get deeply involved, because the issues are technical and the procedures tangled and no one volunteered to get involved. Are you interested in getting involved?  If you want to get involved in any of those issues, you can. 

Setting one group up as the "only" people concerned with online security and asserting that everyone else isn't concerned is an example of how this constituency petition process has become divisive and distracting. 

--MM

________________________________________
From: Non-Commercial User Constituency [NCUC-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of Ralph D. Clifford [rclifford at SNESL.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009 5:48 PM
To: NCUC-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: [NCUC-DISCUSS] Discussion of Cybersafety Constituency

First the background: I am not a member of CP80. I am not a Mormon. I have no
connections to either group of any kind and, before today, I had never heard
of Mr. Yarro. Personally, I don't see pornography as a big problem in society.
Despite this, I am a member of the cybersafety constituency because it is not
the one-issue group that some seem to want to make it; instead, it is a group
of people who are concerned that ICANN's decision-making often ignores issues
of individual safety including such things as identity theft, destruction of
computer resources, etc. And yes, some others in the group are concerned with
the distribution of porn.

Second, a comment: Today's "discussion" has been outrageous. The only thing it
reminds me of are the flame wars that used to erupt on Usenet (although no one
has called someone else a Nazi, yet, just implied it). Unfortunately, that
seems to be the norm in this discussion group. Almost always, ideas are not
exchanged; accusations of conspiracy are. This is too bad as it certainly
discourages the openness that ICANN allegedly wants.

--
Ralph D. Clifford
Professor of Law
S. New England School of Law