[db-wg] 2022-01 V2 Resource Holders Address

In message <CAKvLzuFYcfarXvGLesYTNU1S8dviL=ke4Khv0pLy=hXg9P4cRQ at mail.gmail.com>
denis walker <ripedenis at gmail.com> wrote:

>I was getting comments from people that LEAs need addresses for their
>investigations, but also people had serious privacy concerns about
>publishing their home address in the database...

Who, exactly?

Just because you found one small-fry member who has elected to endorse
this abject silliness, that hardly constitutes any kind of great outpouring
of support, nor does it constitute a persuasive mandate to change the way
things have been done for 20+ years worth of precedent, or the way that
things are still being done in every other region.

You folks in Europe often express amazement that we here in the U.S. are
nowadays having daily mass shooting incidents.  You wonder how our politics
ever got to be so insane.  The reason is that a relatively small by noisy
minority consistantly drive the public debate about guns in this country.

I hope that the same political dynamic will not also drive discussions
regarding the historical openness of the RIPE data base, a data base that
is supposed to be an open public resource.

The fact that a single member insists on their supposed "rights" to BOTH
(a) have IP addresses AND also (b) timidly hide out in a virtual cave
should not be the sole basis for guiding policy choices that affect an
entire planet's worth of Internet users.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  This is NOT much ado about nothing.  I sense the beginning of a
slippery slope.  Today it's mailing addresses, "just" of natural persons,
or so we are told.  Tomorrow it's phone numbers and names and email
addresses.  Once one adopts the position that privacy is everything and
transparency is nothing, then you might as well just put the whole RIPE
WHOIS data base behind a paywall and only allow law enforcement access to
it, and even then, only if they get a warrant first.

I'm sure that such an outcome would suit certain people just fine.  I am
not one of them.