[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] international law enforcement association resolution regarding domain registration data

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 02, 2017 at 06:35:28PM +0000, Greg Aaron wrote:

> The resolution requests that ICANN and related parties provide "continued access to publicly available databases concerning the allocation of Internet resources, and in situations where the maintenance of these databases may conflict with privacy regulation, business concerns, or data-mining prevention efforts, fully consult with the International law enforcement to assist in the resolution of these potential conflicts before removing or restricting law enforcement access to this critical information; and... that IACP membership coordinate the above efforts to achieve the goal of providing consistent, equal, and uniform access to the above-referenced resources for all of the international law enforcement community."
> 

Something that would obviously be helpful in responding to that is a
way of knowing whether someone is in fact part of the "international
law enforcement community".  It might indeed be easier to do that if
we could tell without careful parsing whether the claim is about "the
community of all law enforcement people made of the union of every law
enforcement people in every nation" or "the law enforcement community
working under certain established international standards" or
something else.

My impression of the privacy concerns several people have raised is
partly that what is or ought to be public data in one jurisdiction is
or ought not to be public data in another.  This appears to be a
problem of conflict of laws, and I'm not sure therefore how appeal to
some subset of some enforcers of some of those laws helps us to
understand just what we ought to do.  I am not dismissing the
importance of law-enforcement concerns; I'm rather asking how this
document (as so many others we have collected) helps us in any way to
determine a course of action.

Finally, I note that the argument in the resolution boils down to,
"The way it is works for us, so nobody should change it."  That seems
a pretty weak argument in the face of the sort of pervasive monitoring --
in some cases, possibly contrary to national law, as I think may be
the case in two countries of which I am a citizen -- that came to
light not so long ago.  And yes, I am aware that in some countries,
there is at least in principle an important distinction between the
intelligence and law enforcement services.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com