[governance] GAC Advice Register

[Roland Perry]

In message 
<CAHuaJtPrPPcugLp-1iSXfZ2CAGe15mj8xdE2mTxQ9==838JMgA at mail.gmail.com>, at 
05:38:42 on Sat, 4 Aug 2012, Fouad Bajwa <fouadbajwa at gmail.com> writes
>On a desperate and separate note, some countries nearer to my part of the
>world have quietly put in policies quietly through non public directives
>for censorship, filtering, blocking and DPI surveillance wahay before they
>announced preparation for WCIT/ITRs.
>
>For us from this part of the world, the real threat is no more the WCIT/ITR
>recommendations but what are countries doing prior to influence and
>ascertain their positions and proposals.
>
>We can rant about IGF's lack of outcomes, IBSA, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, UN
>Centric Internet Control and Policing, ITU and WCIT/ITRs, educating
>ministers, unilateral propaganda behind a limited IG issue but the reality
>is that Internet Access Denied is happening behind the curtains, a
>submarine cable termination points on to the national trunks, US and
>Canadian companies are selling heaps of surveillance software and hardware
>for DPI in the name of cyber security but we are engrossed in gacs and lack
>of routing knowledge.

There are many different issues that Internet users might be concerned 
about. State surveillance is just one of them. It's not advisable, to 
concentrate on just one at the exclusion of all others - even if it were 
possible to agree on just one issue, which I'm sure it isn't.

However, it's very helpful when tackling any of the issues to understand 
the basic concepts of the Internet, whether those are architectural or 
policy based. The root name server system is one of the most fundamental 
(but nevertheless still only one of many).

An interesting question to ask is: "If nations are convinced that all 
traffic flows through the root servers, why not attach your state 
surveillance equipment there. It would seem to be a very economical 
solution".

But we don't hear debates about whether that would be a good or bad 
thing (either technically or politically), nor do we hear arguments 
raging about the Dutch Government handing data siphoned off from RIPE 
NCC's root server to less friendly governments.

Many users are more worried about spam than surveillance, and the 
mythical flow through the root servers would be a good place to install 
filters for that. But we aren't exposed to debates about what anti-spam 
rules to install in Netnod's root server.

So something's not quite right with the model (that all the traffic 
flows through 13 hot-spots), and putting that right is an important bit 
of "human capacity building" before discussions about other aspects can 
take place in a sensible fashion.

ps. Another misconception I've heard is that all emails are sent to 
every user in the world, and when you set up your email client with your 
particular email address the job it does is ignore all the emails apart 
from the ones addressed to you. And hence spam is mainly a result of 
that filtering process breaking in some way - so you get lots of emails 
that weren't really intended for you.

Lots wrong with that picture too, of course. Although it's not that far 
off the way ethernet works on a local segment, so perhaps that's how the 
misconception arose in that person's mind.
>
>When do we set our concerns straight?

Who is "we"? Anyone can start immediately if they wish.
-- 
Roland Perry

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