[Chapter-delegates] Proposed law to ban Skype in Russia?

[Fred Baker]

On Aug 19, 2009, at 8:50 AM, Sivasubramanian Muthusamy wrote:
> What is visible and what surfaces is not all that is happening.


Very true.

Now we get into the question of what laws or regulations a government  
is authorized to impose. I come from the school of thought that says  
that a government rules by the consent of the governed; if they don't  
like it, they will take a page out of what happened to the Soviet  
Union in the early 1990's and in what is now called the United States  
of America in the 18th century, and change it. Systems that are better  
governed will require less drastic measures, of course. But if a  
government is doing something and its people don't like it, it is up  
to them to change it, and sooner or later they probably will.

If you want my opinion on wiretap etc, it is that I would rather live  
in a world that respected privacy, and I would rather live in a world  
that respected law. I observe that there are few places where humanity  
uniformly respects law - most people mostly obey the law (although  
perhaps they drive too fast or drop trash on the ground), but there is  
a subset that don't, and a few that flagrantly violate it. Your  
country and my country employ police to find and deal with the few,  
and give them the tools they say they need to do so. A recent study  
that I read a report of (in the local paper; I'm not sure where to  
find it online) stated that while such agencies assert that wiretap  
evidence is an important and useful tool in guiding an investigation,  
when congress asked for examples of the investigations helped they  
didn't come up with many. That said, every person in law enforcement  
that I have spoken with on the topic views interception, when lawfully  
performed, as an essential tool, and as far as I know it is used  
worldwide. Like any tool, it has a dangerous aspect - it can be used  
by the bad guys as well as the good guys, and sometimes the good guys  
aren't so good. So as a technologist I'm willing to have it, but I  
want strong audit trails and strong oversight on its use, and as a  
citizen, I would prefer that the practice was unlawful. That is  
apparently not the consensus in my country, nor in yours.

If a government rules by the consent of the governed, then one must  
expect that in different places laws will differ, because different  
people have different opinions. I think it is well within our purview  
to motivate consensus in a direction we consider helpful; while I can  
say that I might be happy to not be governed by Indian law, I'm not  
sure I feel authorized to criticize the laws in India or the way they  
are enforced. I'm not an Indian citizen. That said, there are some  
countries I don't travel to or are careful about how I travel to, and  
in so doing deny my business and tourist dollar.

> In September last year, DNA first reported how the Indian government  
> has put in place technologies that allow 'sniffing' of e-mails. The  
> technology known as 'Deep Packet Inspection' helps an Internet  
> service provider (ISP) identify various types of internet traffic  
> like music downloads and corporate data exchange on its network and  
> give one kind of traffic preference over the other depending upon  
> the policies of the ISP and its premium clients.


Gee. I've heard of DPI... yes, some ISPs and enterprise mail  
administrations do look at email content and route traffic according  
to preferences. An example of that kind of thing is sold as a service  
by Ironport (which is owned by my employer). In short, if they think  
that an email message is or contains an attack of some kind or is  
fraudulent, they make it go away, and they determine that by looking  
at a combination of the email envelope and its content. I mentioned  
SOBIG.F as a war story; as I pointed out in that email, not only do we  
authorize service providers to do this, we economically force them to.  
If you think that is a bad thing, I would heartily recommend that you  
turn off the bayesian filter on your email - which I almost guarantee  
you have. After all, you wouldn't want to discard that stuff  
automatically... that would be censorship.

Listen. There is evil in the world. You heard it here first. But not  
all that is happening is evil. Much of it is standard business  
practice for very good reasons, and in fact something we do ourselves  
in our own networks and on our own equipment.

I would urge an objective inquiry into the facts before getting out  
the tar and feathers.