On Wed, 19 Jun 2002, Richard Forno wrote:
Is funny that both ICANN and law enforcement are trying to clean up whois information to facilitate investigative capabilities. What a crock.
I'm not really sure why law enforcement is trying to clean it up as they don't really need it. Transactional records are easily subpoena'd and carriers/hosters/providers are duty bound to provide the information. A WHOIS record is junk for the most part.
On paper, and in theory, having 'clean' whois data is nice, and helpful for tech problems, which is the reason I think why it's there in the first place.
I think they want it clean as a list so they can sell, spam, snail mail, all the crap they want to.
As if nobody thought about having a 'front man' doing a registration, or even that the Registrars will be able to truly implement such data-integrity protocols, among any other ways to muck with this info.
With some registrars charging 15 bucks a pop? Forget about competition.
I mean, garbage in, garbage out. Are they going to go door-to-door like censustakers to verify this info?
The reality is it will never work, and besides - any smart criminal will simply use another domain name, or not even USE a domain name.....a power-user computer criminal shouldn't have problems remembering a few IP addys. If they can't, they're stupid and deserve to be caught.
A smart criminal would never use the internet or a telephone. With the advent of enhanced features, Title III's child "CALEA" and the technology behind it, only a fool would use "a wire" to commit crimes. The process to get a surveillance order would never rely on anything substantive from registration data. That may be a pointer to who's providing services to it though.