Re: [ga] whois.txt, ala robots.txt, as a standard ?

[Karl Auerbach <karl@CaveBear.com>]

On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Rick Wesson wrote:

> >  Law enforcement would have access credentials...
 
> who are law enforcement and how do you determine they aren't a 
> stalker?...

Ah, we are finally getting somewhere.

Privacy is a balance, not an absolute.  And to make that balance we 
certainly need to know who is asking for what information, and why.

And as you point out those can be hard questions to answer (and mechanisms 
to answer them could cost money.)

Certainly if somebody knocks on my electronic door and claims to be the
Sheriff of La Puta[*].  My idea of a resonable recourse is very similar to
that used in PGP - build a linkage of trusted introducers.  And how does
one do this in reality?  I call up my local police (who I trust that they
are actually who they claim to be) and ask them to give a thumbs up or
down.  Presumably they will work the way up the authority food chain of my
country, and then down the food chain of La Puta.

The point is that there are established mechanisms to do this kind of
thing - they just need to be optimized, greatly optimized, for our 
context.

		--karl--

[*] La Puta is from Gulliver's Travels - La Puta is an island that bears
some interesting simularities to ICANN. La Puta, like ICANN, has no
grounded territory to call its own.  Instead La Puta floats in the air.  
Servants flap inflated bags on the ears and mouths of their principals
whenever those principals get too deeply engaged in conversation.  La Puta
enforces its will by floating over those it wishes to coerce and drops
stones onto the inhabitants below, or in extreme cases by lowering the
island to squish whatever is below.




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