[ale] firewalls... illegal? Cany anyone read legalese?

[Jonathan Rickman]

--
Jonathan Rickman
X Corps Security
http://www.xcorps.net

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 04:31:00 -0600 (CST)
From: InfoSec News <isn at c4i.org>
To: ale at ale.org
To: isn at attrition.org
Subject: [ISN] Use a firewall, go to jail, *and* send Bill Gates too

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30003.html

By John Lettice
Posted: 28/03/2003

The (DMCA) Digital Millennium Copyright Act clearly isn't enough for
some people. Massachusetts and Texas are - in curious formation -
considering bills that will extend it to make firewalls (among other
things) illegal.

The strange synchronicity is illustrated by a quick look at the draft
of the Texas bill then comparing it with the Massachusetts one, which
you'll find in RTF format at Ed Felten's Freedom to Tinker, here [1].
The strikeouts indicate that both, for whatever reason, have decided
not to repress video this time around.

The repression that remains is however impressive. Felten points to
this wording:

(b) Offense defined.--Any person commits an offense if he knowingly:

(1) possesses, uses, manufactures, develops, assembles, distributes,
transfers, imports into this state, licenses, leases, sells or offers,
promotes or advertises for sale, use or distribution any communication
device:

(i) for the commission of a theft of a communication service or to
receive, intercept, disrupt, transmit, re-transmits, decrypt, acquire
or facilitate the receipt, interception, disruption, transmission,
re-transmission, decryption or acquisition of any communication
service without the express consent or express authorization of the
communication service provider; or

(ii) to conceal or to assist another to conceal from any communication
service provider, or from any lawful authority, the existence or place
of origin or destination of any communication

Over to Ed here, because he puts it so well:

"Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that
concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP
would be illegal -- with no exceptions.

"If you send or receive your email via an encrypted connection, you're
in violation, because the 'To' and 'From' lines of the emails are
concealed from your ISP by encryption. (The encryption conceals the
destinations of outgoing messages, and the sources of incoming
messages.)

"Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely
used for enterprise security, operates by translating the 'from' and
'to' fields of Internet packets, thereby concealing the source or
destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most
security 'firewalls' use NAT, so if you use a firewall, you're in
violation.

"If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the 'Internet Connection
Sharing' feature of your favorite operating system product, you're in
violation because these connection sharing technologies use NAT. Most
operating system products (including every version of Windows
introduced in the last five years, and virtually all versions of
Linux) would also apparently be banned, because they support
connection sharing via NAT."

Ed points out that this boils down to 'use a firewall, go to jail,'
but we really think he's not being nearly ambitious enough here. It
strikes us that, as the proud owner of Internet Connection Sharing,
Bill Gates develops, distributes and licenses a communications device
which is used to conceal "the existence or place of origin or
destination of any communication." So we say, 'use a a firewall, go to
jail, but also send Bill Gates to jail.' Ah, decisions, decisions...

[1] http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ma_bill_draft_26mar03.rtf



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