[anti-abuse-wg] personal data in the RIPE Database

In message <[email protected]>, 
jeroen at hackersbescherming.nl wrote:

>But again, i get the feeling this group hardly has any people in it from the
>public interest and is bassicly filled with internet cowboys who don't care
>about all the crap that is being pushed over the internet.
>
>I have gotten the feeling that Ripe is just a waste of my time when u give
>answers like u have done so far!
>
>And with that being said, this will be my last reply in Ripe mailing lists
>since i get the feeling that the whole Ripe organisation is just looking the
>other way when something obviously wrong is going on....

For whatever little it's worth, everything you just said is 100% accurate,
and it explains why I myself have largely stopped wasting any more of my
time trying to create change within the RIPE structures of power.  They
don't care, and they are not obliged to care, under law.  So they can do
whatever they want, and do.  They hide information that should be public,
using GDPR as a pretense, and allow members to put any gibberish they want
into WHOIS records.  If you ever have the audacity to ask anybody connected
with RIPE for the REAL identification of the REAL owners of any given IP
block, RIPE's corporate legal counsel will tell you to come back with a
warrant or else go pound sand, because no law obliges them to give this
to you, and neither ethical considerations nor public policy considerations
carry any weight with RIPE whatsoever.  It's all just about preserving the
status quo and protecting the guilty.  (As regards to the former, all you
have to do is to just look at the remarkable absence of ANY progress or
notable achievement whatsoever by this, the so-called Anti-Abuse Working
Group, over the past 10+ years.  The group managers, together with a small
group of reliable naysayers, have been rather spectacularly successful at
suppressing any meaningful action or decisions whatsoever for at least
that long and, i believe, longer.)

And it's even getting worse, day by day.  Now they are considering hiding
EVEN MORE of the WHOIS data.  The excuse, once again, is GDPR.  They don't
really care to get any input from either law enforcement or legitimate
security researchers.  God NO!  That might force them to at least have to
acknowlege the existance of some other point of view that doesn't conform
to their already planned agenda of recalcitrance, obstructionism,
consistant inaction, and protecting the guilty.

And yes, over the years this do-nothing agenda has been quite successful in
driving out of these groups and these mailing lists anybody and everybody
who had ever hoped for some positive change but who valued their time and
came to realize that they were just pounding their head against an
impenetrable wall... a wall created deliberately, and in no small measure
by the "consensus" rule that reqires EVERYONE to agree before anything at
all can happen... a moronic rule that applies also in the structures of
the European Union (EU) and that at least some of the elected members of
that body have now gone on television to say is (now) glaringly and rather
obviously unworkable, in practice.

Welcome to the institutionalized dysfunction that is Europe and RIPE -- the
only place on earth where you may be assured of perfect, continued, and
uninterrupted Internet connectivity for your country's hacking and
crypto-scam communities, even as you threaten to touch off World War III.


Regards,
rfg