Is WHOIS going to go away?

Fri Apr 20 20:53:06 UTC 2018

>...in every other form of communication, the phrase "get a warrant" comes to mind.
>Except on the internet where we require the information to be public so that anyone and their dog can view it without a warrant.

Wrong on several counts.  You can publicly access the records of who owns every radio station, television station, and newspaper in the US and a lot of other countries.  All of those organizations are REQUIRED by law to file ownership statements. Every periodical published in the United States has a block in it identifying the publisher.  Every book sold has a publisher listed even if the author chooses to remain anonymous.  It is a violation of the law for a telemarketer to call you without identifying themselves (which is what we complain about with phone scammers).

Get a warrant only applies to communications (like your phone calls and your personal Internet traffic) that have a reasonable expectation of privacy.  If you are in the public square shouting to the world you have no expectation of anonymity and you can actually be held responsible for false statements about another individual.  A publicly accessible website’s published pages would not have any expectation of privacy whatsoever.  Besides we are talking about identification of ownership of a communications site not the communications going through it.  Just because I have your WHOIS data does not mean I have root access to your server.   The government needs a warrant to listen to your phone calls but not to know you have a phone and where it is.   We are not letting people monitor your traffic through WHOIS, we are only identifying who is responsible for all communications coming from that site.

Another point is that “get a warrant” does not apply in totalitarian countries in any case.  Try saying get a warrant in North Korean or China.  Pretty moot point there.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

No one ever had the liberty of publishing information to the public without accountability.  There are tons of laws protecting you from false statements and communications intended to harm your reputation or damage your business.

You are giving up an essential liberty here which is knowing who is saying what about you.  Do you not want the right to know the sources of information presented to the public?  Do you think I should be able to post anything I want about you in the public square without accountability?  Can I put up a billboard criticizing you personally and keep my identity a complete secret?  Might it be nice to know that the source of political news might have an axe to grind or an ideological bent, would you like to know that the news story you just read was actually from an opposition candidate?  Are we not making a huge deal about Russia messing around with elections and trolling?  How would you ever know that was going on with no accountability of the source of information?

The whole protecting you from the government point is nothing but a straw man.  There is no nation state that does not have enough resources to recover that information from you or your communications carrier.  Even if your traffic is encrypted, it is trivial to figure out who is posting to social media or underground websites via other intelligence or simple traffic analysis.  They can deny their entire populations access to just about any communications media they like.  Most of them don’t because it is actually a more lucrative source of intelligence than a threat.  If you are a dissident I might be better off leaving you on the Internet and trying to map your network of people even though it would be easy to just interrupt your comms.

From a technical perspective, the domain naming system and Internet addressing system are assets you do not own.  They are assigned to you and are considered a type of resource under quasi governmental control.  If you keep WHOIS data secret all you are really doing is keeping the public out and the government in.  Do you really believe that ICANN will stand up to the world governments if they ask for the data?   If so, you probably also believe that the UN is effective at keeping the world at peace.

Steven Naslund
Chicago IL