(Joi has pointed out that media are not allowed into this hall, but bloggers are allowed to blog it. Interesting.)

John Gage, of Sun, gives an introduction to how the Net is viewed by the international leaders to whom we will submit a one-page set of recommendations. Our vocabularies are different, he says, so making a succinct statement is going to be difficult. Our metaphors about “openness” don’t work. And, he says, security agencies had thought they were in the control business, but now they’re being told that they need to share information. They’re confused and we need to understand their needs and way of thinking.

Conference room

Wendy Seltzer of the EFF says governments believe if we could track everyone and every message, we could catch the terrorists. But, she says, we need to preserve privacy. Currently, very little of what you do on line is truly anonymous, unless you take active steps.

Paul Vixie says that the Net was initially left uncontrolled because you had to be an academic with a university affilitation to get onto the network. We have no “admission control” for email or for data packets. When the attack comes from 10,000 servers each sending you a couple of packets a secoind, there is no practical way to track them all back and stop them. “The robustness we feel about the internet is illusory.” Any angry teenager with a couple of hundred dollars of equipment can take down a site. We have to preserve anonymity if only to allow political dissent to continue, but we also need to fix the vulnerability, he says.

Paul: I’m advocating admission control not because I like it but because otherwise it’s too easy to bring down the Internet. To ensure that there are no forged headers, we have to agree to turn a few knobs on the routers. To make this work, we’d have to regulate the ISPs to require them to turn those knobs, and this would have to be done through international treaty so it wouldn’t just move overseas.

I asked Paul about this during the break. He says that admission control would have no effect on the ability of governments to track down dissenters. He is an anonymity advocate and would like to make it easier to be anonymous on the Net. But he’s not sure how to do that while also ending the ability to create denial of service attacks.

[Technorati tag: SafeDemocracy]

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