.CAT WHOIS Proposed Changes - call for public comments - Think hard!!

[Mark Leiser]

First - a disclosure of sorts. I am Konstantinos Komaitis's PhD Student.

I have been reading the discussions with interest...

That being said, as you will know a decision today was released by the US
Supreme Court about requiring law enforcement to get a warrant before
slapping a GPS tracker on your car —

Interesting is Justice Sotomayers judgement in which she says we may need a
re-think of the "3rd-party doctrine"...

"More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an
individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information
voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the
digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about
themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.
People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular
providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which
they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books,
groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. Perhaps, as
JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the “tradeoff” of privacy for
convenience “worthwhile,” or come to accept this “diminution of privacy” as
“inevitable,” and perhaps not.

I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless
disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited
in the last week, or month, or year. But whatever the societal
expectations, they can attain constitutionally protected status only if our
Fourth Amendment jurisprudence ceases to treat secrecy as a prerequisite
for privacy. I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed
to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason
alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection.
I agree that there is a balancing act between privacy rights and network
operations, but as privacy is a fundamental right in Europe and with US
Supreme Court justices making the above statements, I think we should
always push for more privacy rights and more protections from law
enforcement and in particular, "trademark protection specialists" -
especially since IP addresses and database listings don't necessarily
relate to the individual.

Justice Sotomayer sums up, "Dramatic technological change may lead to
periods in which popular expectations are in flux and may ultimately
produce significant changes in popular attitudes. New technology may
provide increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy, and
many people may find the tradeoff worthwhile. And even if the public does
not welcome the diminution of privacy that new technology entails, they may
eventually reconcile themselves to this development as inevitable."

So while the decision protects people from warrantless surveillance, what
about people who have voluntarily added their names to a list or a
database? Should LEA's have access to lists that have been given to a
third-party? I think this is exactly the type of protections we should be
fighting for...

Kind regards,


Mark Leiser


145 Kilmarnock Road
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On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 7:52 PM, McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 1/23/12, Nicolas Adam <nickolas.adam at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The devilish details will have to be with framing a balancing act
> > between privacy and network operations.
>
> That's right, and it was always the case (until fairly recently) that
> to have an Internet resource one was
>
>
> >
> > Which brings me back to a previously unanswered set of questions
> > regarding facts crucial to think about the appropriate balance to be
> > sought between privacy and network operations.
> >
> > I asked (with apologies for naivety/ignorance):
> >>
> >> In the interest of seeing what could be done to alleviate the
> >> challenges of network operators, could someone be kind enough to
> >> present a digestible summary (or accessible references) that groups
> >> the usual things that are sought by operators from registrants when
> >> dealing with typical classes of network problems, as well as the
> >> purpose for which they are sought after.
>
> http://www.icann.org/en/faq/#gltdrules
>
> "Information about who is responsible for domain names is publicly
> available to allow rapid resolution of technical problems and to
> permit enforcement of consumer protection, trademark, and other laws.
> The registrar will make this information available to the public on a
> "Whois" site"
>
> Reasons vary, but can include a multitude of issues, DDOS attacks, DNS
> abuse of various kinds, botnet mitigation, blacklisting, zone walking,
> etc, etc.
>
>
> >>
> >> Perhaps the possibility of certain actions on account of a registrant
> >> (or the possession of certain information) could be transferred to [a]
> >> proxy service offering hard anonymity, so that it could cooperate with
> >> operators under certain classes of context?
>
> Perhaps
>
> > Any ideas on how to preserve the balance, McTim?
>
> Which balance? today's (which IMHO is skewed towards "privacy") or
> that of the earlier halcyon days of the network which were too
> transparent for today's tastes (apparently)?
>
> If you use Internet resources you have a responsibility to be
> contactable regarding the (mis)use of that resource.  We (ICANNistas)
> are not ensuring that responsibility is being upheld lately.
>
> --
> Cheers,
>
> McTim
> "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
> route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel
>
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