At 22.52 +0200 0-05-21, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
They're making cooperation, whether we want it or not.
Not an IETF problem.
Maybe not an IETF problem, but the way we act when the
police come should be discussed either in IETF or in
ISOC.
A well-known example from some years ago. A very popular
so-called anonymity server was running in Helsinki.
(I would rather designate it as a pseuodynymity server.)
Its data base know who was behind each pseudonym,
and used this to allow the forwarding of e-mail to
pseudonyms. The anonymity server sent such messages
along to the real e-mail address, but without divulging
what that address was.
Now came the scientology church. They are very against
all kinds of discussions and divulging of information
about them to outsiders. Someone had used the anonymity
server in Helsinki to distribute, on a usenet group,
information which the scientologists did not like.
They went to the police (in the USA) saying that this
person had infringed on their copyright by publishing
their secret documents on Usenet. The police in the
USA contacted the police in Finland. The police in
Finland went to the anonymity server and gave him
to choices: Either we take the whole server, or you
tell us who is behind this pseudonym. He told them
under duress who it was. But shortly after that, he
shut down the server.
Should the Finnish police really have done this?
Should he have accepted their requests, or should
he have called a lawyer and tried to move the issue
of whehter to divulge this information into the
courts in Finland?
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/