Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Netizens-Digest Volume 1 Number 237
Netizens-Digest Tuesday, January 5 1999 Volume 01 : Number 237
Netizens Association Discussion List Digest
In this issue:
[netz] YEAR-END WORLDWIDE ROUND-UP ON INTERNET PRIVACY
[netz] Re: who regulates ISP? (fwd)
[netz] Re: who regulates ISP? (fwd)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 1999 13:51:37
From: John Walker <jwalker@networx.on.ca>
Subject: [netz] YEAR-END WORLDWIDE ROUND-UP ON INTERNET PRIVACY
Registrations for the On-line Learning Series of Courses
for January/February '99 are now being accepted. All courses are
delivered by e-mail, are two to three weeks in duration and cost
between $5.00 US and $15.00 US. Information is available at:
http://www.bestnet.org/~jwalker/course.htm
Starting 15 January 1999
How to Search the World Wide Web Level 2
Creating web pages with HTML Level 1
Creating web pages with HTML Level 2
Effective Use of E-Mail
Eudora Pro Level 2
Using Netscape Messenger Level 1
Using Netscape Messenger Level 3
Using Netscape Messenger Level 4 (a)
Starting 1 February 1999
Introduction to the Internet and On-line Learning
How to Search the World Wide Web Level 1
Using Eudora Lite and Pro Level 1
Using Eudora Pro Level 3
Using Netscape Messenger Level 2
Using Netscape Messenger Level 4
The following is an excerpt from the CSS Internet News. Please feel
free to pass this along to other Netizens provided that the complete
message is forwarded with all attributes intact.
- --------------------
YEAR-END WORLDWIDE ROUND-UP ON INTERNET PRIVACY
by Andy Oram
American Reporter Correspondent
http://www.american-reporter.com/
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- The most prominent cyber-rights issue of the year
is privacy. Several other pressing problems vie for top billing --
such as freedom of expression, which was the subject of a recent
Human Rights Watch report, or universal service, which got a
battering in the United States as the government fought over the
E-Rate for schools and libraries -- but in historic world trends,
privacy saw the most interesting developments.
The fight for privacy took contradictory paths this year. In toto,
there will be more snooping and more data collection over the next
few years. But some positive developments can also be seen.
The right of consumers to protect their personal information from
businesses took a couple steps forward. At the same time, protections
against snooping (particularly from the government) were weakened.
Encryption, which is essential to all forms of privacy protection --
as well as freedom of expression, as pointed out in the Human Rights
Watch report -- remains legislatively crippled.
A natural place to start our survey is the Communications Assistance
to Law Enforcement Act, the earliest legal attention given by
government to the Internet and, appropriately enough, the area also
providing the most recent news.
CALEA, a law extending traditional wire-tapping capabilities to
digital telephones, was proposed during the Bush Administration and
passed in 1994. Every step was dogged by debates over how much power
the law should give to the police. Amazingly, four years after the
law's passage and months after the original deadline for
implementation, the combatants are still arguing over it.
The outlines of the new wire-tapping capabilities are now clearly
drawn. But on December 14, various telephone companies submitted
comments to the FCC complaining about some details in its proposed
technical requirements. Several civil liberties groups (the
Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, and the ACLU) raised similar concerns.
The technical arguments over requirements are arcane: for instance,
should call-completion information include the keys pressed by a
suspect after making a call, or should that keying information be
given only when the police have the right to listen to the content
of the call?
Arguments over details are not worth retelling here. The point made
by the telephone companies is that the FBI is demanding, and the FCC
willing to ratify, wire-tapping requirements that would raise
telephony costs substantially, or worse still, require major
technical design changes to wireless phones and networks. Telephone
companies fight parts of CALEA for financial reasons, while the civil
liberties groups talk of the frightening extension of governmental
power.
Digital, wireless telephones expand the range of activities available
to the public. It is now clear that, at least in small ways, CALEA
will also expand the information available to the police through
wire-taps, which have increased in number over the years.
Expanded access to law enforcement was not the intent of the law, but
it is the outcome of negotiations over its implementation. One
provision that law enforcement didn't win as part of CALEA, "roving
wiretaps" that cover a suspect rather than a particular phone, was
granted in a separate law that passed the House in October.
The goal of CALEA, which is to permit the government to tap into
digital communications, spread internationally this year. Governments
as diverse as Great Britain, Russia, and India proposed requirements
for Internet providers to give law enforcement access to their
customers' personal communications -- bypassing, in all cases,
traditional legal checks on wiretapping.
Four weeks ago, the European Union proposed a sweeping surveillance
system to be called ENFOPOL. It goes beyond CALEA by covering all
digital communications (such as electronic mail), not just telephony.
ENFOPOL is an imitation of a mysterious global surveillance system
called Echelon, whose operation is shrouded in the same kind of
secrecy that used to completely hide the National Security Agency.
Recent news reports exposing the existence of Echelon led some
privacy advocates to hope that European governments would fight it,
but they have taken warmly to the idea instead.
There is another wave sweeping the world, however, driven by public
opinion. This movement calls for restrictions on databases, both in
government and in private industry, and for control by individuals
over critical data like their medical histories and purchasing
habits.
October 1998 was to be the date when all member countries of the
European Union were to adopt strict laws regulating what information
is collected from people, how it is collected, and with whom it can
be shared. On the same date, European countries were supposed to stop
sharing data with companies in countries that lacked similar
protections -- a bold threat to bring international trade to a halt.
While governments around the world passed laws to protect privacy so
that their trade with Europe would not be disrupted, U.S.
representatives expressed confidence that no drastic severance of
trade would occur. Their gamble paid off, because data exchange
between the U.S. and Europe continues while negotiations over the
privacy directive drag on.
Even in the EU, several countries have missed the deadline for
passing privacy laws. But it is important to realized that many,
notably Germany, have strong laws in place. These laws have proven
that a modern economy can include privacy protection, and have
formed the basis for the EU directive.
In the U.S., government and business tend to agree that restrictions
on data sharing are costly and (the ranking sin of government) an
expression of over-regulation. Polls show that the public takes a
dramatically different view.
In the absence of laws, sophisticated tracking continues to encroach
on privacy, through such systems as the Doubleclick service that
allows multiple Web sites to share purchasing information. But a few
cracks have appeared in the government's anti-regulation position.
In June, after a year of investigating commercial practices on the
Web, the Federal Trade Commission suggested for the first time that
Congress pass a law to protect privacy. The scope of the proposed
law was narrow -- to keep sites from asking children under 13 for
personal information unless their parents approved -- but the very
idea was an admission that self-regulation by businesses is not
always enough. Furthermore, the FTC's report contained an enormous
amount of evidence that businesses were not taking privacy seriously.
The final major issue for our privacy wrap-up is encryption. Here,
the status quo remains relatively untouched.
Encryption is a rare instance of a technology that works well and
whose spread is hampered only by law. The U.S., where most
encryption products are developed, has held back the export of
strong encryption for decades through Commerce Department
regulations, unshaken by many Congressional attempts to remove them.
Unlike the past few years, no law was introduced into Congress this
year either relaxing or strengthening laws against encryption.
Luckily, government proposals for cumbersome key escrow systems --
where central databases keep users' keys and hand them over to
governments upon receiving legal wiretapping requests -- have waned.
Perhaps the FBI is busy with other things, such as the investigation
of campaign finance law violations (although one could ask then why
it have done so little about them). Congress and the Clinton
Administration also seem preoccupied with other matters.
The British government, however, has floated a plan for key escrow,
and a law remains on the books in France requiring it for all
encryption used in that country. There is no reason to believe that
such a system will actually be feasible, though.
The main encryption battle took place around the international
Wassenaar Agreement, which tries to control the spread of military
and "dual use" technologies. The agreement always contained a
place-holder for encryption, but it had serious holes and left many
encryption experts hoping that it would prove useless in the face of
movements in many nations to liberalize encryption.
Instead, at a conference that met earlier this month to update the
agreement, the U.S. persuaded delegates to add clauses that
essentially committed the 33 member countries to adopt restrictions
like those in the U.S. Encryption of any strength can be developed
and sold within these countries, but cannot be exported to a
non-member country unless it includes a maximum key length of 56 bits
- -- a length making it easy for governments (or anyone with a lot of
computing power) to break the key and view the communication.
Having completed our privacy wrap-up, I will follow the poor example
of many other journalists at this time of year and leap into the
crystal ball with some predictions:
- - Privacy protection laws will spread. They are popular, and the
experience of European nations show that they are feasible.
- - Front-line volunteers in the privacy battle, through well-tested
techniques like submitting personal information under invented names,
will expose the sale of information by famous businesses in violation
of privacy laws or posted policies.
- - Finally cornered into obeying privacy restrictions, businesses will
solve the problem by expanding the obnoxious practice of offering
discounts to customers who volunteer their personal information.
- - Law enforcement agencies will continue to push unworkable schemes
like key escrow and ENFOPOL just to enhance their images in the eyes
of legislatures and ministers.
- - More effectively, governments will continue to hold the line
against strong encryption. Although such policies hamper commerce
and threaten civil liberties, they are clearly winning over more
governments as reports come out about pornography rings and
terrorist networks.
- - Most of us will muddle along using 56 bits or whatever kind of
encryption governments allow. Few of us will experience difficulties,
because it takes work to track down our communications on the
Internet.
- - Given the use of weak encryption, occasional scandals will emerge
concerning sensitive communications that are broken by unethical
business competitors, sensation-mongering journalists, or angry
opponents in lawsuits. These breaches will be reported as if they
were sad acts of nature, not the preventable results of public
policy.
- - Meanwhile, law enforcement will continue to spar with political
dissidents (including that tiny fraction that can legitimately be
called terrorists) to find ways to alternately conceal and break
communications, cheerfully ignoring applicable laws.
So that's the scene. If you don't like it, there is still time to
speak up. Unless you feel safer keeping your opinions private.
Link:
Echelon: Exposing the Global Surveillance Network
http://www.bestnet.org/~jwalker/resource.htm
- ---------------
Also in this issue:
- - YEAR-END WORLDWIDE ROUND-UP ON INTERNET PRIVACY
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- The most prominent cyber-rights issue of the year
is privacy. Several other pressing problems vie for top billing --
such as freedom of expression, which was the subject of a recent
Human Rights Watch report, or universal service, which got a
battering in the United States as the government fought over the
E-Rate for schools and libraries -- but in historic world trends,
privacy saw the most interesting developments.
- - MS sues men over domain names
HOUSTON -- Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit against two Texas
men who have registered Internet domain names including
microsoftwindows.com and microsoftoffice.com.
- - Defining moments of the Internet, 1998
It was quite a year for the Internet, a medium that's only recently
emerged in the commercial form known to most users.
- - Catalog and internet sales threaten state surpluses, report warns
WASHINGTON -- Cautious spending and a robust national economy have
left virtually all the states in solid financial condition for the
fifth year in a row, but facing the possible loss of billions of
dollars in tax revenue to the sale of goods via mail order and the
Internet, according to a fiscal survey released Wednesday.
- - Anti-spam laws to aid California Internet users
California consumers and Internet service providers gain two of the
toughest laws in the country tomorrow to help them rid their e-mail
inboxes of unwanted messages promising everything from sudden wealth
to titillating pornography.
- - New Year's Resolutions, the Web Way
Achieve perfection by 2000--with a little help from the Web.
- - New Lists and Journals
1) IDFA Magazine on the Internet
2) Global WealthStream News
3) Babel
4) The Amateur Poetry Journal
5) Journal of Cotton Science
6) Developmental Science
7) Circles of Light
8) Weekly Web Newsletter
9) The Parenting Network
10) The Mezzenger NewsLetter
11) FreewareWeb Online!
12) Annual Reviews: Physical Sciences
On-line Learning Series of Courses
http://www.bestnet.org/~jwalker/course.htm
Member: Association for International Business
- -------------------------------
Excerpt from CSS Internet News (tm) ,-~~-.____
For subscription details email / | ' \
jwalker@hwcn.org with ( ) 0
SUBINFO CSSINEWS in the \_/-, ,----'
subject line. ==== //
/ \-'~; /~~~(O)
"On the Internet no one / __/~| / |
knows you're a dog" =( _____| (_________|
http://www.bestnet.org/~jwalker
- -------------------------------
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 12:46:11 -0800 (PST)
From: Greg Skinner <gds@best.com>
Subject: [netz] Re: who regulates ISP? (fwd)
- ------- start of forwarded message -------
Message-ID: <3689F254.692ADA4D@email.com>
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1998 09:28:52 +0000
From: Erik <opt1@email.com>
Organization: JPSnet
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (WinNT; I)
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: ba.internet
Subject: Re: who regulates ISP?
References: <765vt8$bkn$1@nnrp1.crl.com> <36879e5a.19932083@supernews.sirius.com> <76d3ro$oum$1@ultra.sonic.net> <368c58a4.1968977@supernews.sirius.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.63.224.77
X-NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.63.224.77
Lines: 40
X-NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.63.114.134
Path: news3.best.com!news2.best.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.cwix.com!209.210.46.218!news-west.eli.net!blushng.jps.net!209.63.224.77
Xref: news3.best.com ba.internet:39379
The difference between common carriers and ISP's is that one
traditionally has been controlled by regulation and the other by
competition. It would be scary to think what the Pac Bells could do
without regulation since especially before the telecommunications act of
'96, there was virtualy no competition to keep the level of service and
prices in check. Now that other companies are now allowed to compete for
local and long distance, there is some competion in the market, but Pac
Bell, of course, still has the monopoly in California. Hence, the need
for regulation.
ISP's on the other hand are VERY competetive. You must have a unique
price and/or service model to even hope to survive. It is very expensive
to run an ISP and the customer has to always be king. Hense no need for
the government to intervene.
trebor@sirius.com wrote:
>
> Scott Doty <no-spam@sonic.net> wrote:
>
> >trebor <drg@pgh.org> wrote:
> >> CzarCasm <stanleyb@crl5.crl.com> wrote:
> >
> >>>who, if anyone, such as the PUC, regulates the services provided by ISP's
> >>>as to quality of service?
> >
> >> Absolutely no one.
> >
> >> And just in case someone told you different, ISPs are NOT common carriers.
> >
> >What differentiates ISPs from common carriers?
>
> The status of such granted by the US Government.
>
> Now, you might say that what ISPs do (or should do) is very similar to what a
> common carrier does, and I'll probably agree. But that's not enough. It's like
> the difference between a profitless business and a non-profit organization.
> They're not the same thing. :)
>
> No ISP has been granted common carrier status, afaik. If anyone knows
> otherwise, please post.
- ------- end of forwarded message -------
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 12:48:42 -0800 (PST)
From: Greg Skinner <gds@best.com>
Subject: [netz] Re: who regulates ISP? (fwd)
- ------- start of forwarded message -------
Path: news3.best.com!news2.best.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news-feed.fnsi.net!peerfeed.ncal.verio.net!news.ncal.verio.com!not-for-mail
From: gerg@shell1.ncal.verio.com (Greg Andrews)
Newsgroups: ba.internet
Subject: Re: who regulates ISP?
Date: 3 Jan 1999 14:35:33 -0800
Organization: The Nerd From B.O.F.H.
Lines: 36
Message-ID: <76orbl$e1o$1@shell1.ncal.verio.com>
References: <765vt8$bkn$1@nnrp1.crl.com> <368c58a4.1968977@supernews.sirius.com> <915364849.257536@rockhead.com> <368f9847.1623500@supernews.sirius.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: shell1.ncal.verio.com
Xref: news3.best.com ba.internet:39419
trebor@sirius.com writes:
>newhouse@pimin.rockhead.com (Paul Newhouse) wrote:
>
>>In article <368c58a4.1968977@supernews.sirius.com>,
>> trebor@sirius.com writes:
>>> No ISP has been granted common carrier status, afaik. If anyone knows
>>> otherwise, please post.
>>
>>Ahhh, MCI? AT&T? BellSouth? PacBell? GTE? USWest?
>
>Their *phone* business, yes; their Internet access business, no.
>
PacBell has been behaving as if the common carrier regulations
apply to their Internat access business. Remember when Aegis
was hosting Cyberpromo? A number of people in this newsgroup
were harshly critical of PacBell. One of their engineers(?)
replied saying some of their customers had selected Aegis as
their backbonecarrier, so they couldn't drop Aegis. The way
he described that backbone selection process gave the impression
that it was being handled just like the selection of long distance
carrier for telephone service.
MCI also tied their internet service to phone service. When my
fiancee and I moved, MCI insisted on closing her mci2000.com
account and opening a new one - just as they do with telephone
service. MCI forced her to abandon her old e-mail address, which
is 100% ridiculous from the standpoint of the Internet service.
As far as I can tell, these companies are acting as if the telephone
common carrier regulations apply to their Internet business also.
They might be wrong, but the end result is the same: The telco ISPs
think they've been granted common carrier status, with all the attendant
regulations.
-Greg
- ------- end of forwarded message -------
------------------------------
End of Netizens-Digest V1 #237
******************************
