Use a Firewall, Go to Jail

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow" <geoff () iconia com>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 08:30:00 +0100
To: "Dave E-mail Pamphleteer Farber" <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: Use a Firewall, Go to Jail

Use a Firewall, Go to Jail

The states of Massachusetts and Texas are preparing to consider bills that
apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright
Act. (TX bill; MA bill) The bills are obviously related to each other
somehow, since they are textually similar.

Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both
bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that
"conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of
origin or destination of any communication". Your ISP is a communcation
service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of
any communication from your ISP would be illegal -- with no exceptions.

If you encrypt your email [SSL POP & SMTP connections between
my laptop and where my mailbox], you're in violation, because the "To" line
of the email is concealed from your ISP by encryption. If you use a secure
connection to pick up your email, you're in violation, because the "From"
lines of the incoming emails are concealed from your ISP by the encrypted
connection.

Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for
enterprise security, operates by translating the "from" and "to" fields of
Internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each
packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security "firewalls" use NAT,
so if you use a firewall, you're in violation.

If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the "Internet Connection
Sharing" feature of your favorite operating system product, you're in
violation because these connection sharing technologies use NAT. Most
operating system products (including every version of Windows introduced in
the last five years, and virtually all versions of Linux) would also
apparently be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT.

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000336.html

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
geoff.goodfellow () iconia com * Prague - CZ * telephone +420 603 706 558
"success is getting what you want & happiness is wanting what you get"
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/01/biztech/articles/17drop.html
http://www.tapsns.com/members-bio/geoff-goodfellow.shtml



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