On Tuesday, May 15 at 10:56 PM, quoth Dean Anderson:
I get a 404 on this page,
Oops. My mistake. It should be:
http://www.av8.net/IETF-watch/People/JohnLevine
I've heard this a lot. In nearly 10 years of calling ISPs a couple
times a month to remove unlawful blocks (which escalates to lawyers
about once every 6 months after running into a SORBS-partisan
sysadmin), no ISP lawyers have ever disagreed.
Unfortunately, the state of our legal system is such that ISPs tend to
be so nervous about legal things that they will do things when asked
even when they don't have to. For example, you can demand that an ISP
take down a website for DMCA violations, and chances are they'll do it
without even glancing at the website they take down
(http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA553.htm).
Interloc was also dubious. Their view got the company criminal
charges
No, their *actions*, combined with the views of the prosecutor, got
the company criminal charges. There's a difference. Thought-crime is
not *yet* a punishable offense in America.
and a $250,000 fine. The company plead guilty. The IT sysadmin plead
guilty, and were fined $2100 in a plea deal to testify against
Councilman.
Pleading guilty is not a binding legal precedent. All it really means
is that the defendant didn't want to fight their accuser for some
reason. It doesn't validate the law, and doesn't make for a case that
can be cited when prosecuting other similar offenses. There are many
reasons that defendants plead guilty, though (unfortunately) actual
guilt is a pretty rare one. Generally, it's because the defendant
decided the charge wasn't worth fighting---which is particularly the
case with Interloc since Alibris didn't seem to like the original
behavior to start with. Fighting such charges is often quite
expensive, and paying a fine is often the cheapest way out. That's why
most "big" cases involve either lots of money at stake, or matters of
principle (with very bull-headed litigants).
In the end, though, this particular case (Interloc) seems to me to be
rather irrelevant, since it's talking about making copies of emails,
not whether or not DNS information should be made available to
everyone. There is a fundamental difference between a crime based on
some piece of data getting into the hands of those who shouldn't have
it (i.e. wiretapping) and an act (crime?) based on some piece of data
NOT getting into the hands of someone with a "right" to know it.
Suppose, just for example, your phone company won't let anyone in
Canada call you. That's very different, from a legal perspective, from
if they were recording all of your phone conversations. In the former
case, you can just say to yourself "this policy stinks, I'm going to
get a different service provider." In the latter case, however, there
are much bigger issues at stake.
And finally, despite DNS being viewed as "public" information by some,
it absolutely is not necessarily public information. There are lots of
people who, for example, have a split-horizon DNS setup where
computers within their own network get different answers than
computers outside the network---the answers given to the internal
computers are most certainly *NOT* "public" information. Just because
you communicate a piece of data via a particular protocol doesn't make
it automatically "public". Take, for example, the Department of
Defense's classified network. They use DNS, but that network isn't
physically connected to anything else. Surely you don't plan on
claiming that all of that DNS information is public information? DNS
provides a means of distributing information, nothing more.
~Kyle
--
The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste.'
-- Pablo Picasso
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