[anti-abuse-wg] EU Data Protection

In message <CAArzuos3fjDeZ0XWktjGRCV=pMgiTcW6MQc+KAQeTbmFc5nVow at mail.gmail.com>
Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

>History, especially operational history, is out there for people to
>actually learn from it, not trot out stale tropes about Internet police and
>the stasi.

I thank Suresh for coming to my defense, if that is what he intended.
But for the record let me also say that I am not at all offended, in
the present context, to be equated to the hated Stasi of old.

I recognize that there is a difficult balance between security on the
one hand and privacy on the other, and that one man's defender of the
public good is another man's loathsome Stasi agent, and vise versa.

In fact, I'm more of a privacy advocate that some here might expect,
and was myself greatly amused upon seeing on TV scenes of European
protesters carrying satirical posters of Barack Obama with headphones,
clearly reminicent of the old Stasi listeners.  (He richly deserved
that, I think.  And I say that as somebody who voted for the guy...
twice.)

To be clear, I detest what our NSA has done, both to us here in the US
and also to the rest of the world.  I believe it to be immoral, illegal,
and downright criminal.  The hair stands up on the back of my neck, and
I get up on my hind legs and start screaming whenever someone reminds
me that my own tax dollars have been used to collect the SMTP metadata
for each e-mail I send... e-mails for which I believe I have... or had,
anyway... a reasonable expectation of privacy, at least until Mr.
Snowden came along and helpfully diabused me of that notion.

I do however draw a distinction... as it seems you Europeans do...
between gathering intelligence about individual natural persons for
whom there is -zero- basis for any clearly articulatable suspicion,
and gathering intelligence about relationships between -corporations-
and more specifically about ones for which there _is_ a clearly
articulatable basis for suspicion.  Also and separately, I believe
that there should be complete transparancy in the operations of,
and relationships with any and all `public interest'' organizations,
and I personally would categorize RIPE, and all other RiRs, under
that banner, even if a majority of the dues paying members would
prefer it to be viewed strictly as a private commercial consortium,
with no external or public responsibilities whatsoever.


Regards,
rfg