U.N. agency to draft possible limits on Internet anonymity

rebekah — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:46:59 -0400

A document obtained by CNet News has revealed that the U.N National Security Agency is part of a group drafting a set of technical standards determining how to trace Internet communications back to their original sender, potentially limiting users' ability to remain anonymous, according to a report published Friday.

The group, named Q6/17, is headed by the U.N. International Telecommunications Agency (ITU) and is reportedly acting on a proposal submitted by the Chinese government. The group is meeting in Geneva this week to work on the proposal, and meetings are closed to the public.

The proposal is intended in part to fight distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, but experts claim most experienced hackers would still be able to avoid detection.

The report has raised concerns among digital freedom advocates, who claim the standards would violate human rights and who cite the potential for abuse by governments who may use tracebacks to identify and "quash" political opponents.

Steve Bellovin, a Columbia University computer scientist and IETF member who drafted a different tracebook proposal in 2000, criticized the Q6/17 approach in a recent blog post, saying, "Network design should have as a primary goal the efficient operation of a network. Naturally, security is an important design consideration; the question, though, is what security really means. There are lots of possible definitions; to me, though, none of them include political censorship."

Online anonymity is a legal right in the United States and is recognized by international organizations including the Council of Europe and the ITU itself. Though the U.N. lacks the authority to enforce global Internet standards, the Q6/17 group plans to work with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the United States Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center. This collaboration could lead to acceptance of the standards by national governments.

The proposal is scheduled to be finished next year.

New Domain Names May Aid State Censorship

brendan — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:36:20 -0400

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - the organization that licenses domains like .com and .edu - meets in Paris this week to discuss two proposals which could change the shape of the Internet. The first would create a new class of non-latin alphabet domains - Cyrillic and Chinese, for example - while the second would create a potentially infinite number of 'generic' domains - .museum, for example, or .africa. (See [here] for a post on the second proposal.) The first proposal includes potential censorship concerns, which are discussed below.

The new proposal considers adding non-latin country names - the Chinese character translation of .cn, for example, and the Cyrillic translation of .ru - and if approved would cede management of those domains to their countries' respective governments. The Chinese government already operates .cn and the Russian government operates .ru, and both countries have repeatedly censored material within these domains. Last year Russia censored the popular website Lenta.ru for criticizing Uzbek elections, and this year Russian lawmakers proposed censoring any online material the government deemed "extremist". China has a long history of censoring websites related to the Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square, and continues to censor politically sensitive sites in the run-up to the Olympic games.

In the face of ongoing censorship, ICANN could do two things to aid free speech in these countries. First, it could require an 'open access' provision for these new non-latin domains. That is, it could require that any person who wanted to buy a specific site within the Cyrillic or Chinese domains (www.falungong.cn, for example) could do so, regardless of his or her politics. Second, ICANN could relax registration requirements for purchasing new domain names. For example, it could strike its own requirements that buyers give their addresses or contact information, or it could mandate people be allowed to purchase domain names under pseudonyms (provided, or course, that the buyers actually paid their bills). In this way governments would have a much harder time controlling end-user content.

The current proposal for non-latin domains does neither of these things. After all, ICANN considers itself a technical body, not a political one. And even if ICANN were to impose these sorts of requirements, a government could try to create its own top-level domains, and provide its own registry services, ostensibly making a separate Internet. Yet even if ICANN's influence on the Chinese (or any) government is small, it remains the best-placed organization to make just such a demand for free speech.

You can track the debate in Paris here and here; a decision on the non-Latin domains is expected this week.

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U.N. agency to draft possible limits on Internet anonymity

New Domain Names May Aid State Censorship