[RDS-WHOIS2-LawEnforcement] Declined: RDS-WHOIS2 Law Enforcement Needs Subgroup Call | 23 February | 16:00 UTC

Fri Feb 23 09:31:45 UTC 2018

Dear colleagues,

I'm very sorry but I cannot join phone calls on Friday afternoons as I'm with the children then.

I discussed a number of ideas on one of the last plenary calls and updated on some of the work we did on Whois within the Commission/EU, on which basis we could run a survey of law enforcement. I have gone back to the previous WHOIS RT law enforcement survey, please find the questions below. I have to say that I don't really think these are very good questions and perhaps as a result the response rate was not very good. Some of the questions cover general policy issues and choices rather than targeting specific law enforcement needs.

1.      Does WHOIS policy and its implementation meet your needs?
a.      If so, are any aspects of the WHOIS service more important than others?
b.      If not, what issues or problems have you encountered with WHOIS?
2.      How important is WHOIS for law enforcement activities? Are there alternative data sources that you could use?
3.      What changes to WHOIS would you recommend to better meet the needs of law enforcement? Please provide reasons.
4.      In your view, how well is ICANN performing against these requirements? Please provide reasons.
5.      Do you have specific examples of effective ICANN policies or implementation activities, or suggestions of how ICANN could improve its performance?
6.      How can ICANN balance privacy concerns with its commitment to having accurate and complete WHOIS data publicly accessible without restriction?
7.      Are you aware of any efforts by country code Top Level Domain operators within your jurisdiction to find a balance with regards to WHOIS between potentially conflicting legal requirements for data protection, privacy and data disclosure?
8.      What is the importance of WHOIS data being publicly available without restriction?
9.      How should ICANN address concerns about the use of privacy/proxy services and their impact on the accuracy of the WHOIS data?
10.     What is your view on the use of privacy and proxy services by registrants?
11.     Are there any other relevant issues that the review team should be aware of? Please provide details.

Here are the questions that I recently asked for the PSWG/EMPACT workshop to prepare participants and gather more information on the actual uses of the WHOIS:
•       How many Whois lookups do you make per month? How many lookups does your unit or other units or agencies make?
•       Do you use bulk lookup (Port 43), e.g. to download large amounts of Whois data?
•       Do you rely on external services provided by private companies in relation to Whois, e.g. DomainTools or others?
•       Do you use cross-referencing of Whois data fields, e.g. to identify other domains that were registered using the same information? How often is this used?
•       Which data fields are important for your investigations?
•       Do you have experience using gated access systems, e.g. on the basis of credentials assigned to you personally or to your organisation? Which requirements exist for your organisation?
Some of these are more forward-looking, like the last one. However, it might be useful to build some additional questions around these, e.g. to determine what current issues are in these usages. It might also be helpful to get a bit more information on the gTLD WHOIS vs. the ccTLD offer and how that affects law enforcement needs. I am happy to spend a bit more time thinking about these questions, ideally with someone else on the subgroup, and would welcome any feedback that you have on these ideas.

Apologies again for not being able to join you today.

Best regards
Cathrin

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