[ncc-services-wg] Finding previous user of IP addresses

On 10 Dec 2019, at 13:15, Roland Perry wrote:

> … How do I as (nowadays anyway, an outsider) access such historic 
> snapshots of the IP address range, before today's ISP acquired them.
>
> Is this a 'service' that RIPE NCC offers (and hence my question in 
> this forum).
>
> Sometimes the answer is "we aren't allowed to tell you - because of 
> data protection". But I suspect the dirt was acquired by a user 
> outside the EU, and hence arguably outside the protection of EU DP 
> law. …


Hello again Roland,

I promised to make work of this. Here is a progress report.

Indeed we have the history in the database, as we should.

The not-so-good news: current policy is to not make it available because 
of privacy concerns. Unless there is pressure from the community that is 
not likely to change soon. I am no lawyer but I expect that this policy 
could change at least for data that is not ‘personal data’, which 
would be good enough for what you seek. But I guess that more than two 
people have to ask for it. A reasonably concise request from this WG 
would go a long way.

The good news: we already publish resource transfers and so do all RIRs. 
See
https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers-and-mergers/transfer-statistics
Unfortunately these are bulk JSON files and not directly queryable. So I 
did not Dre to mention this until I knew more.

In the meantime, and as an interim tool to address your need, I have 
asked Rene Wilhelm, one of the real stars here, to publish a small part 
of his research toolkit at
http://sg-pub.ripe.net/rene/transfers/
This produces searchable .csv files which reveal the reason for the 
trouble in your original question.

Of course this information should be available in RIPEstat! Actually, 
due to collaboration between APNIC and the RIPE NCC, the APNIC transfers 
can now be queried in RIPEstat. Example:
https://stat.ripe.net/widget/apnic-transfer-history#w.resource=202.172.128.0
I am told that implementing this for all transfers is on the to-do list 
for RIPEstat. Again: the priorities follow community demand.

I hope this addresses your question and projects that we are indeed 
responsive to the community.

Daniel