[ih] [IP] EFF calls for signatures from Internet Engineers against censorship

[Dave CROCKER]

On 12/19/2011 4:21 PM, John Curran wrote:
> On Dec 19, 2011, at 5:57 PM, Dave CROCKER wrote:
>> Telephonic and postal communications do not require identification of the person originating the communication nor even of the person receiving ("identify parties", per your note.)
>
> Actually, international telephony provides exactly that information,
> including number identification services as required by the ITU
> International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs).

Your original message referred to '"real world entities" such as people and 
businesses' and 'obtain the legal parties'.

Nothing that is done today for postal or telephone directly identifies people 
who are using the service, nevermind certifying the identification.  At best, 
what are identified are devices and places, and perhaps their owners.  For 
postal origination, the 'place' can merely be a post office.  Sometimes the 
information is useful, but it's a long way from identifying people.


> I meant exactly what I wrote: If the Internet we had provided better mechanisms
> (as we presently have with telephony)

Presumably a viable solution for the Internet is readily available and can 
operate without undue collateral downsides.  Please point to the specifications; 
some operational experience documentation would also be nice.

Absent those, you are offering a premise that lacks the texture of practical 
experience.  That is, it's theory.

In theory, there isn't much difference between theory and practice.  In practice...

And for anything involving social systems, it's worse.

I'm pressing the point because the tendency to rely on "if we had done" lines of 
commentary about the Internet -- or anything else involving complex social 
systems -- is a distraction from serious, careful, practical /present/ 
consideration, except for cases that meet the set of 4 conditions I cited in my 
previous note.

My own preference is to have this mailing list worry about pragmatics on matters 
such as government-imposed restriction of Internet behaviors.


 > then the inability for the US government
> to obtain cooperation to identify and shutdown a given foreign website streaming
> US-illegal content would much more clearly be seen as an actual failure of common
> values&  diplomacy rather than "a problem with the Internet" per se.
> We have mechanisms which work fine for telephony: if you receive death threats
> via an international caller, there is actual law enforcement protocols to deal
> with such.

Death threats are the problem this proposed Internet restriction is about?

Let's make sure that the misbehaviors covered for the different services are 
equivalent.  I suspect that excessive marketing contacts over phone or postal 
mail are not all that trivial to shut down or necessarily identify...


> In fact, if there were actually a pervasive Internet usage/accounting framework
> deployed, we'd be dealing with a very different problem than SOPA... The ability
> to definitively obtain who downloaded what content would have created enormous
> pressure for after-the-fact billing and/or prosecution rather than controls on
> the distribution side.

What is unfortunate is the range of explanations for seeking to move more and 
more control into the network transport infrastructure, exactly contrary to the 
original design goal of the Internet (and in contrast with a core design 
characteristic of the Arpanet.)

It's really quite frustrating to see how easily the end-to-end arguments are 
being dismissed or, at least, undermined.

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net