[AusNOG] Understanding lack of Aus connectivity to melbournefreeuniversity.org.

[Nathan Nogic]

Hi Danny,

 

Re your question, absolutely, every carrier that has a telco licence is, by law, required to provide interception capabilities to comply with lawful direction from the courts or a number of law enforcement agencies as a condition of their telco licence. That also governs what they can and can’t say just like any other action taken on behalf of law enforcement or in compliance with a court order.

 

At the risk of going off on a tangent, while I can understand why this debate stirs up emotion, what I’m keen to understand from members of this group is why, because it relates to the internet, the emotional response seems to be much greater than if a law enforcement organisation (or any organisation complying with a court order) enforces a legally binding request to do just about anything else that affects shared infrastructure in society at large.

 

My guess is that we feel that freedom of expression and access to information on the internet should override certain obligations (not saying I support mandatory filtering, etc), however, I suspect that we overlook countless incidents on a daily basis which now fall into the same ‘societal infrastructure’ category as the internet. On a daily basis Police shut down a roads to stop motorists getting to the scene of a crime or accident, restrict access to public or private premises for any number of reasons, tap phone lines to listen in on criminal organisations, etc but we don’t see the same sort of response. I suspect that’s because actions on these public utilities has become ingrained within society as part of our day to day lives and an accepted level of law enforcement action is considered normal for the safe and smooth running of society in general. I’m not sure this attitude has translated to the internet as yet (or ever will).

 

The facts that we know is that ultimately, we don’t know why or who the block was targeted at other than the IP address and why enforcement was only taken up by specific ISPs. That could have been haphazard filtering or it could have been targeted at certain end users. Without specific information, we don’t, and most probably will never, know any other circumstances surrounding the action and that is probably not going to change unless it gets to court and someone reads the transcripts (not me!) :). 

 

Cheers

 

Nathan 

 

 

From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Danny O'Brien
Sent: Saturday, 13 April 2013 12:11 PM
To: Bevan Slattery
Cc: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Understanding lack of Aus connectivity to melbournefreeuniversity.org.

 

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 6:28 PM, Bevan Slattery <bevan at slattery.net.au <mailto:bevan at slattery.net.au> > wrote:

Nope – wrong.  You get a notice to block.  You block or either get fined, go to jail or lose your carrier licence.  It is a blunt instrument and it is a condition of being at "the big boys table" i.e. you're a carrier or a carriage service provider.  You don't ask too many questions, you don't post it to Ausnog and have a decision by committee.  You block the IP address as you are required to by law and you do it immediately.

 


Bevan, 

Just to clarify here: are you saying there is an established process under the Telecommunications Act whereby Internet ISPs in Australia have been required to block specific IPs by law enforcement, with a secrecy requirement attached? And that's it's separate from the voluntary, DNS, filter agreed to by some ISPs?

It would seem, given the extremely strong public reaction to the public filter proposals, that this might be something of a matter of public interest. At the very least, it would be hard to keep a list of /32 blackholes secret, given the number of people that BGP feed might be shared with. Are internal BGP route databases also covered by this secrecy requirement?

d.


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