Marty, I think it would be more productive to: 1) clearly express your concerns (without the innuendo and quotation marks when you are not quoting, and drop the attempts to shade the discussion as if collection of traffic statistics is being done for bad purposes) 2) identify mechanisms which meet your concerns and at the same time allow for data to be used for traffic engineering and observation of trends in the Internet. (I know that you will try to twist this last phrase, but I don't want to spend the time to make it inductively correct and un-twistable ..., so when you quote me please be sure to include this disclaimer) My bet is that there is a simple, and happy common ground that could be found wrt these issues. It will require you and others to sit down and build a consensus for a data collection framework. Rather than sniping why don't you help bring this consensus about?
Merit/NSFNet already tackled these issues in an insufficent and unopen manner.
I believe Merit's process of data collection conforms to the only document in the Internet RFC series that discusses policies for traffic collection. With your current line of logic it would appear your conclusions on an unopen process are fallacious. If you want a different policy, then I suggest you build a consensus on what a better policy would be. TO be a "sufficient" policy one can not expect Merit or any small subset of the community to posit a replacement of an established policy, there needs to be broad participation. My sense is that the Sprint NAP policy is based on discussions and input that Sprint has gained from a wide variety of parties including a broad ranging discussion at the NANOG held in Ann Arbor early in SUmmer 1994. Perhaps you would care to ground your discussion of Sprint's policies on facts and perhaps even discuss specifics? Marty, You can do better. cheers, peter