WHOIS points (re: Markus Hanauska) (LEA definition) ("Applicable Laws" definition)

[Volodya <Volodya@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There are three issues that i would like to raise at this point, and i'll do so
in a single e-mail rather than breaking them up one per e-mail.

1. I am in an almost complete disagreement with Markus Hanauska, the author of
"My experiences with the WHOIS database and why I would abolish it" e-mail. In
his[1] post he suggests that WHOIS data needs to be only available to LEA as is
currently defined, i believe that such a restriction without a total abolition
of the database will make matters much worse. Currently the problems of WHOIS
data are known and the reason why they are known is that it is public, after
hiding the data we'll end up in the situation where the problem still exists but
nobody quite knows about it.

   The problems of the private "government only" WHOIS get amplified when we
consider how many human rights abuses happen in the world, and most of these
abuses are perpetrated by the governments.

   This may lead to the idea of having no WHOIS database at all, but i realise
that currently such a policy would be infeasible, and as such the only other
possibility is to keep the data as public as possible and encourage the use of
proxy/privacy services which can be mandated to forward the communication to the
true WHOIS holder when non-spam comes in.

   To address the problem of spam i must add that i use WHOIS data in my fight
against it as an administrator of socially editable sites quite effectively. I
have set up several bot-traps which collect information from the sites (often
they collect e-mail addresses and other such data), when the bot hits this bot
trap i always do a WHOIS lookup on the domain of the ISP of that IP address to
find an abuse e-mail to report the misconfigured or malicious bot (going to the
site of ISP is sometimes necessary, but is significantly longer than looking at
WHOIS record, often no abuse e-mail is listed on the site at all).

2. The term LEA (or "Law Enforcement" as it's termed) is defined without making
the scope clear. As this conglamaration of groups is being somehow placed in the
separate category than the "regular humans" it is important to know if we are
talking about traffic wardens or NSA here. In addition to that the term
government needs to be defined very carefully, several micronations exist in
today's world, and they do have their governments, can they create agencies
which will be placed in this category?

3. "Applicable Laws" falls into the opposite trap as it does not define the
exclusion process. To explain what i am trying to say through an example i would
like to examine the very real possibility when the local laws and UN
declarations are in conflict, only one can termed "applicable" but it is unclear
which.

[1] As Markus is a name normally associated with the masculine gender i will use
the masculine pronouns, in case of error no offence is intended.

-- 
http://freedom.libsyn.com/     Echo of Freedom, Radical Podcast

 "None of us are free until all of us are free."    ~ Mihail Bakunin