On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 08:52:55AM +0100, Andy Loukes wrote:
What (if any) are the legal implications of taking internet destined traffic in one country and egressing it in another (with an ip block correctly marked for the correct country).
Somebody mentioned to me the other day that they thought the Dutch government didn't allow an ISP to take internet traffic from a Dutch citizen and egress in another country because it makes it easy for the local country to snoop.
I'm not in a position where I would know for sure, but I'd be surprised if it were the case, in a atmosphere of European common market and police cooperation and all European police-judiciary trust all other European police-judiciary even more than the ones of US states do (as in a Dutch judge can issue a arrest warrant and French / German / ... police will execute it without intervention of a French / German / ... judge, nor decision by any administration, ... Possibly, it could be construed as a violation of the concept of European common market, and thus it is forbidden to forbid. What I would expect is that you still have to obey lawful intercept legislation, so you need to interconnect with the government "black box" rooms, and these are at the major IXs in the country. (And I've repeatedly heard that in the Netherlands, for some time in the past at least, the way the ISPs got rid of the lawful intercept obligation was to have the AMS-IX send a copy of *all* the traffic to the government black box. Not that they had to do that, but it was the easiest / cheapest way.) If there were any such obligation, I'd expect the real reason not to be "the egress country can snoop", but "it is harder for the originating country to snoop". Also, I've heard that Canada had (maybe still has) this legislation forbidding you to route intra-Canadian *telephone* traffic through another country. Something about else nobody would build a intercontinental coast-to-coast Canadian network, would just send long-distance traffic to the USA, go to other coast and send it back to Canada and being this dependent on a foreign country, that's bad. -- Lionel