Routing public traffic across county boundaries in Europe

Lionel Elie Mamane lionel at mamane.lu
Fri Jul 27 04:14:35 UTC 2007


On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 08:52:55AM +0100, Andy Loukes wrote:

> What (if any) are the legal implications of taking internet destined
> traffic in one country and egressing it in another (with an ip block
> correctly marked for the correct country).

> Somebody mentioned to me the other day that they thought the Dutch
> government didn't allow an ISP to take internet traffic from a Dutch
> citizen and egress in another country because it makes it easy for
> the local country to snoop.

I'm not in a position where I would know for sure, but I'd be
surprised if it were the case, in a atmosphere of European common
market and police cooperation and all European police-judiciary trust
all other European police-judiciary even more than the ones of US
states do (as in a Dutch judge can issue a arrest warrant and French /
German / ... police will execute it without intervention of a French /
German / ... judge, nor decision by any administration, ... Possibly,
it could be construed as a violation of the concept of European common
market, and thus it is forbidden to forbid.

What I would expect is that you still have to obey lawful intercept
legislation, so you need to interconnect with the government "black
box" rooms, and these are at the major IXs in the country. (And I've
repeatedly heard that in the Netherlands, for some time in the past at
least, the way the ISPs got rid of the lawful intercept obligation was
to have the AMS-IX send a copy of *all* the traffic to the government
black box. Not that they had to do that, but it was the easiest /
cheapest way.)


If there were any such obligation, I'd expect the real reason not to
be "the egress country can snoop", but "it is harder for the
originating country to snoop".


Also, I've heard that Canada had (maybe still has) this legislation
forbidding you to route intra-Canadian *telephone* traffic through
another country. Something about else nobody would build a
intercontinental coast-to-coast Canadian network, would just send
long-distance traffic to the USA, go to other coast and send it back
to Canada and being this dependent on a foreign country, that's bad.


-- 
Lionel



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