________________________________________________________________________________ -- British Telecom wants ICANN to regulate sex-themed web sites -- Japan may require mandatory ID checks for digital signatures -- Proposed US military budget will fund domestic wiretapping -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FC: British Telecom wants ICANN to regulate sex-themed web sites Declan McCullagh Mon, 07 Feb 2000 12:55:40 -0500 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some of the corporations hoping to influence ICANN want the group to segregate web sites with erotic or sexual-themed material. In a post sent apparently accidentally to a public mailing list, we see that the British Telecom delegate to an ICANN working group says such sites must not be able to register in, say, a new top level domain (.ent?) created for "entertainment" purposes. "This is becoming a more significant issue for us as the introduction of digital tv and its potential for distribution on the Net raises the public awareness of this issue," wrote BT's John Lewis. It might sound like a good idea at first, but there are lots of problems with it. For instance, who decides what sites have an unacceptable percentage of sex-themed content? ICANN? British Telecom? Network Solutions? Morality in Media? The police? It's not an obscure issue. Web sites that most of us might think to be perfectly legitimate contain sex-themed content. Editors of news organizations like Salon and CNET testified in the Child Online Protection Act lawsuit that they could be vulnerable to prosecution because their content might upset America's self-appointed purity protectors. (The judge agreed, and blocked prosecutors from enforcing the law.) Original post from British Telecom's John Lewis: http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/ga-full/Arc00/msg00090.html Mirrored copy here in case it disappears from the archive: http://www.well.com/user/declan/docs/msg00090.html Background on ICANN DNSO working group: http://www.bcdnso.org/WGrapporteurs.htm Article on Salon and CNET testimony in COPA lawsuit: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,17465,00.html -Declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FC: Japan may require mandatory ID checks for digital signatures Declan McCullagh Mon, 07 Feb 2000 12:57:27 -0500 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jim Lucier To: Declan@well.com Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 09:27:46 -0500 Subject: For FC: Japan May Require ID for Dig Sigs http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000205/tc/japan_internet_crime_1.html Saturday February 5 1:36 AM ET Report: Japan Fights Internet Crime TOKYO (AP) - With hackers barraging government Internet sites, Japanese police announced plans to improve crime-fighting in cyberspace, newspapers reported Saturday. Beginning late last month, unidentified hackers began a high-profile campaign to crack state sites. And despite its love for just about everything high-tech, Japan is far behind other countries when it comes to tackling online crime. The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest paper, said the National Police Agency has requested $1.78 million from the country's fiscal 2000 budget to battle the problem. Police want to study how hackers break into Web sites and ensure user names are not being abused, the reports said. [...] A bill aimed at improving user verification, a so-called digital signature bill, is due to be submitted to parliament soon, the Asahi Shimbun reported. Digital signatures allow people to use the Internet to buy and sell goods and services, it said. The police agency is urging that mandatory identity checks on people who apply for such signatures be made part of the bill, the paper said. The proposed legislation comes on the heels of a new law parliament passed last summer to make it illegal to access sites without the proper clearance. It takes effect this month. [...] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FC: Proposed US military budget will fund domestic wiretapping Declan McCullagh Mon, 07 Feb 2000 17:12:43 -0500 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,34164,00.html Clinton's Wiretap-Heavy Budget by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com) 1:25 p.m. 7.Feb.2000 PST WASHINGTON -- President Clinton's proposed $1.84 trillion budget includes millions of dollars in new spending on technology and law enforcement programs. The record budget request for the 2001 fiscal year, which begins 1 October, asks Congress for more money for wiretapping, police databases, antitrust enforcement, and computer crime forensics. One of the heftiest increases, from $15 million to $240 million, will pay telephone companies to rewire their networks to facilitate federal and state wiretapping. Under the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), Congress may "reimburse" phone companies for their efforts, but the controversial process is the subject of a lawsuit currently before a federal appeals court. Half of that money, $120 million, will come from the Department of Defense's "national security" budget -- a move that alarms privacy groups. "The proposal to use thinly disguised intelligence agency money to fund CALEA confirms what we have suspected all along: the National Security Agency is a silent partner in the government's campaign to make our entire telecommunications system, including the Net, wiretap ready," says Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union. [...] >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology >> To subscribe: send a message to majordomo@vorlon.mit.edu with this text: >> subscribe politech >> More information is at http://www.well.com/~declan/politech/ >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org