Subject: [Raven] market forces or law?

From: Ed Stone <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1999 11:19:17 -0500

If new or modified protocols to facilitate wiretapping are a legitmate IETF 
or IETF WG undertaking based not on law, but rather on market demand alone, 
would market demand for modifying pop and smtp protocols to make harvesting 
of email addresses from web surfers without asking their permission also be 
a legitimate IETF or IETF WG undertaking?

If not, then isn't the purported *legal foundation* of wiretapping the 
critical factor upon which IETF would rely in order to justify undertaking 
such creation or modification of protocols to facilitate wiretapping, and 
*not* market forces?

With the *law* as the critical, necessary and justifying factor, then 
wouldn't it be prudent and responsible for IETF to:

1. get a rigorous and professional legal analysis of the law prior to 
assuming a requirement from a legal layman's viewpoint?

2. develop a policy as to which nations' laws shall be accepted by IETF as 
adequate (necessary and sufficient) basis for protocol creation and 
revision? US CALEA/FCC only? North Korea and Myanmar, but not Iraq and 
Libya? UN? Cleveland metropolitan area?

Why this rush to standards, before the TIA report (mandated in the August 
FCC Ruling, and due in September 2000), and the result of current 
litigation against the FCC Ruling (filed and in process) are in hand?

The worst case scenario requires packet wiretapping (as described in 
J-STD-025) no earlier than September, 2001. In Internet years, 21 months is 
a heck of a long time.... Why the rush now, without even the TIA report in 
hand to point to the actual "requirements"?

If protocols are modified to service J-STD-025, now, won't that be pitched 
when TIA provides its report?

And since (for US purposes) bugging equipment is regulated under export 
controls, wouldn't providing protocol-level wiretap facilitation 
essentially "export" a bugging capability to the nasty seven as well as to 
the "good countries"? To help protect packets travelling through North 
Korea and Libya, wouldn't it be a "good thing" to not hand those 
governments (via borderless protocols) a better bugging tool that should be 
export regulated?
--
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Ed Stone
[email-masked]
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From: Sampo A Syreeni <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 08:15:05 +0200 (EET)

>a legitimate IETF or IETF WG undertaking?

Whence a slight historical question: wasn't it once thought that internet
protocols (WRT IETF, the more or less complete TCP/IP suite) provided a kind
of greatest common denominator for interoperability? Where does tapping fit
into the picture?

Sampo Syreeni <[email-masked]>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university