RE: [Raven] Comments on Draft -- Take 2

[Chris Savage <[e-mail]>]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: chefren [mailto:[e-mail]]
>Sent: Monday, February 07, 2000 11:39 AM
>To: [e-mail]
>Subject: RE: [Raven] Comments on Draft -- Take 2
>
>
>On 7 Feb 00, at 10:56, Chris Savage wrote:
>
>> IMHO this portion of the draft is pointing out that as matters stand
>> today, the divergence of national laws regarding wiretapping 
>is one thing
>> that makes an IETF standard to facilitate tapping a bad or unworkable
>> idea.
>
>Is this "tested"? I don't know of divergence of national 
>laws, to the contrary, all EU countries are lining up.

My own knowledge is most focused on US/CALEA issues.  AFAIK the specific
requirements of CALEA (which applies, one will recall, only to carriers and
manufacturers of carrier equipment, not to "information service" providers)
are unique to the US in various respects.  Other countries have other
specific things that one has to do, as I understand it.

Some time ago I pointed out that to actually determine the degree of
difference/overlap between the legal requirements of various countries would
entail a non-trivial amount of lawyer time and effort.  That said, due to
various quirkiness-es of US law, I would suspect that what CALEA will
require for particular carriers/manufacturers will be different from what
other countries will require.

Note also that in most countries, I think, people who are not carriers
(e.g., in the US, ISPs, backbone providers) are still subject to getting
served with a court order to cough up information, allow the attachment of
listening devices, etc.  The questions in such cases are (a) what kind of a
showing does the LEA have to make to the judge to get the order? and (b) who
bears any extraordinary costs associated with the activity?  From this
perspective, CALEA is a lot more about allocating costs than about technical
capabilities (although there is obviously a large "technical capabilities"
component to it).

So, to answer your question directly, no, AFAIK my proposition has not been
"tested" -- the "testing" is what would take a bunch of lawyers a bunch of
(high-cost) hours to confirm.  But it strikes me as having a very high
likelihood of being true.

>> In a totally hypothetical world in which (say) countries
>> making up 95% of 'net traffic and users had effectively
>> identical wiretapping requirements, divergence of
>> national laws would not be as strong an argument against
>> IETF activity in this area.  It does not follow that the
>> IETF, in such a situation, either would or should create
>> a standard. It is just that in such a situation the
>> reasoning might have to be a bit different.  As someone
>> famous once said, "sufficient unto the day is the evil
>> thereof..." 
>
>
>I see a strong kind of "not invented here" resistance.
>
>There is no will to think about what wiretap standard could 
>be there is only an "against".

It seems to me that the predominant opinion on the list is that wiretapping
by LEAs is a (maybe) necessary evil, but plainly an evil that the IETF
should not facilitate.  Also, that any "legal" wiretapping regime could be
abused by either oppressive authorities (insert your favorite villainous
regime here) or by out-of-sanction LEAs (the LAPD example), not to mention
random Bad Guys who somehow get in a position to use the capability.  This
leads to a consensus that on the whole facilitating the process from a
technical perspective is, net-net-net, a Bad Thing, as opposed to a Good
Thing.

The point at this late stage of the discussion is not to claim that your
counter-arguments have zero persuasive power.  Perhaps by virtue my own
(lawyer) training (every issue has at least two sides), it seems clear to me
that the persuasive power of your arguments is well above zero.  Even so,
those arguments have failed, in this forum, to persuade very many people.
Again, maybe due to my training, the notion that good, sensible arguments
might lose (and, yes, I know some on the list would not credit yours in that
way) is not shocking -- it happens every day.  Either because better, more
sensible arguments prevail, or because the decision-maker perceives the
actual issue to be one as to which the arguments are not quite as strong or
relevant as their proponent would like.

>
>IETF could perfectly design a auditable version of tcpdump.

I'm not techie enough to comment on this.

>A good tap just taps everything to and from a programmed IP 
>address without editing the content in any way. That's all, 
>nothing more and nothing less.

Isn't that do-able today?

>"Divergence of national laws", sigh...

We still live in a multi-national world.  Perhaps we always will.  Don't
think of it as social bug, think of it as a social feature...

Chris S.
All views/opinions my own...


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