North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Dave Farber comments on Re: Major Labels v. Backbones
On 17 Aug 2002, Paul Vixie wrote: > Am I the only one who finds it odd that it's illegal to export crypto > or "supercomputers" to certain nations or to sell such goods with > prior knowledge that the goods are going to be resold in those > nations... or even to travel to certain nations... yet no law > prohibits establishing a link and a BGP session to ISP's within those > nations, or to ISP's who are known to have links and BGP sessions to > ISP's within those nations? Well... it is not always legal. The "trade with the enemy" act may prohibit ISPs from connecting with countries on the list. In the old times I had a discussion on the subject with Steve Goldstein (regarding Iran). > I'm not sure I'd be opposed to it, since economic blockades do appear > to have some effect, and since data is a valuable import/export > commodity. I think homeland security is a good thing if it means a > mandate for IPsec, DNSSEC, edge RPF, etc... but if we *mean* it, then > why are US packets able to reach ISP's in hostile nations? This is silly, because: a) no one can deny connectivity to "bad guys". You can merely create a minor annoyance to them, in form of having to use a proxy somewhere in Europe. b) all you can really achieve is to restrict access for their populace; effectively making the job of "bad guys" easier (hint: governments in non-friendly countries do agressive filtering of access to Western networks themselves). It is a known phenomenon that given the Western cultural dominance in the net, it is one of the best pro-Western propaganda tools around. Propaganda (in the right direction) is good, because if you can convince someone to come to your side, you don't have to kill him to prevail. I can only hope that H.S. Dept will see it this way. > I want to know what the homeland security department is likely to do > about all this, not what is good/bad for the citizens of hostile > nations or even nonhostile nations. Likely nothing, unless they are complete incompetents. The point is: there's no feasible way to achieve any gains by restricting access on per-country basis. It is a lot more useful to suppress the enemy propaganda by going after its sources which are easily located. I would suggest going after CNN first [sarcasm implied]. --vadim
|