U.N. Agency Eyes Curbs on Internet Anonymity CNet (09/12/08) McCullagh, Declan
as it appeared in the September 12, 2008 edition of ACM TechNews.
Technologists and privacy advocates are very concerned by the United Nations' (UN's) International Telecommunication Union's (ITU's) drafting of technical standards proposed by the Chinese government to define techniques of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially restricting the ability of users to maintain anonymity. "What's distressing is that it doesn't appear that there's been any real consideration of how this type of capability could be misused," says Electronic Privacy Information Center director Marc Rotenberg. One of the most disturbing aspects of the initiative is that it could institutionalize a means for governments to suppress their opposition, which conflicts with the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, notes Columbia University computer scientist Steve Bellovin in a recent blog post. Countering distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is the most commonly cited rationale for IP tracebacks, but Bellovin says the method's usefulness in this regard has waned because few attacks employ spoofed addresses, there are too many sources in a DDoS attack to be useful, and the source computer inevitably would turn out to be compromised anyway. Technologist Jacob Appelbaum warns that a traceback system would offer malevolent hackers the ability to commit wrongdoing without being caught, thus abusing the very system that is designed to trace them. The official charter of the ITU's Q6/17 group states that it will work "in collaboration" with the Internet Engineering Task Force and the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center, which could supply a route toward widespread acceptance. A formal legal mandate to adopt IP traceback would likely be blocked by the First Amendment in the United States. Click Here to View Full Article
