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Congress Eyes Whois Crackdown
Decius6i5 writes "The Washington Post is reporting on a Congressional hearing in which it was proposed that putting false or misleading information in your DNS whois record should be a federal crime. Texas Representative Lamar Smith is quoted as saying 'The Government must play a greater role in punishing those who conceal their identities online.' The article claims 'Smith and Berman drafted the bill after receiving complaints from the entertainment and software industries that much of their material is made available for free on Web sites whose owners are impossible to track down because their domain name registrations often contain made-up names.' Its funny, I don't recall the RIAA having any trouble tracking down P2P users whose IP addresses didn't have any DNS names associated with them at all. This isn't the first time the issue has been raised in Congress but apparently Congress hasn't gotten any more clued after several hearings."
Write your senators or representatives, via snail mail or fax and inform them of this issue, especially if they are members of the revelant committees.
The bill would not affect people who are trying to safeguard their privacy because it only makes it a crime to submit false registration data when it is done to help commit a crime, said Mark Bohannon, senior vice president for public policy at the Software & Information Industry Association, which supports the bill.
Oh, fer Pete's sake, Taco. Would it really hurt all that much to give a full, accurate blurb on this one?
This isn't about forcing people to use their real name when registering a domain. This is about increasing the severity of the punishment for committing online fraud. Basically, if you commit fraud using a website with faked credentials, you'll face a stiffer penalty than you would had you committed fraud on a website where you used legitimate credentials to register.
I'm not saying I've fully researched this, but it sure as hell isn't the rights-trampling orgy the blurb makes it out to be, Taco. Do your homework before posting half-informed diatribes to the front page.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Trouble is, that's not what they're doing. They're talking about creating harsher penalties for people who commit fraud with a website registered under fake credentials.
They're not going to go hunting you down for having false information. Rather, if they catch you committing fraud on your website, they'll tack another few years onto your sentence if the site info wasn't accurate.
You gotta stop believing what they say in the front-page blurbs.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
If the RIAA and MPAA can't find the fake WHOIS record owners, how is the government going to track down the WHOIS record owners and punish them?
Very simple. If the registrar can't contact you because you gave them bogus info then the registration gets dumped. Quite an effective and fair punishment - you are abusing a priviledge so that priviledge gets revoked.
Although I do understand where you are comming from with regard to address harvesting from public WHOIS records. If you were to implement this policy you would have to provide the option for registrants info to remain private to the registrar. Then it wouldn't be such a burden for honest people to provide the correct information.
Oddly enough I had the exact same situation.I had two email addresses. One of them was public and I used it everywhere - in forums online etc.. The other was private and wasen't used anywhere. The public one started with "spam" as in "spamandrewt@..." and I had, like 3 piece of spam in it during its life. The private one almost had to be abandonned because of the level of spam. If it weren't for yahoomail's nice spam filtering I would get about 100 spams a day. In the end the spam email address was deleted citing lack of use.. The guy in the cube next to me has a similar story.. I wonder if we're on to something here :-)...
This is offtopic, but I find your misuse of statistics disturbing too:
that idea might be more accurately stated as "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will accidentally shoot their own kids,"
Your statement would imply that there are a lot of accidental shootings. You seem to be buying the gun control and media hype. Statistically, there are VERY few. Taken from guncite.com
"The risk of being a victim of a fatal gun accident can be better appreciated if it is compared to a more familiar risk...Each year about five hundred children under the age of five accidentally drown in residential swimming pools, compared to about forty killed in gun accidents, despite the fact that there are only about five million households with swimming pools, compared to at least 43 million with guns. Thus, based on owning households, the risk of a fatal accident among small children is over one hundred times higher for swimming pools than for guns."
Or maybe I'm reading your comment wrong, just my $.02
Some Canadian registrars, such as Internic.ca offer a service called Privacy.ca that hides your registration information, so random people can't look up your info.
If it becomes a federal crime to lie in domain records, something similar could be implemented to protect those who want to remain (somewhat) anonymous.
From their website:
ICANN then contracts out services to corporations for manage the DNS registrations. Currently, VeriSign controls
2001-2002
The top industries supporting Howard L. Berman are:
1 TV/Movies/Music $222,791
2 Lawyers/Law Firms $117,450
Lamar Smith also gets mondo payola from MPAA/RIAA.
Berman was one of the shills who drafted a nutty bill last session that would have allowed movie and music companies to hack into people's personal computers and networks to erase or destroy "copyrighted" material. Most notably, it indemnifies corporations against personal torts resulting from their error for damages under $250. So even if you've almost finished the greatest novel ever written but failed to find a buyer yet, if they erase it, you get nothing. If they destroy your hard drives but show the replacement value is below $250, you lose. And so on.
There is nothing Berman would not do to keep sucking at the media industry tit. Even to the degree of drafting such nonsensical law that clearly violates the "equal treament" under privilege or immunity of the 14th Amendment by immunizing corporations against felonious activities conducted by them against citizens without considering due process.
THis latest bit of nonsense is just more of the same. Obviously Smith smells some extra cash within reach and is now also busy pandering to the media conglomerates.
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