The controversy over internet privacy has swept into public consciousness in the past few years as lawsuits hinging on identity discovery have become more prevalent than ever. Lawsuits regarding piracy, malware, internet harassment and even libel have depended upon identifying anonymous defendants. One subcommittee of the United Nations — known as Q6/17 — is working on a so-called IP Traceback mechanism designed to rapidly uncover the source of digital communications.
Organized by the ITU, an agency of the UN, the Q6/17 group received its first submission from China. China’s record of internally-censoring the internet has historically relied upon their ability to suppress individuals subversive to the regime. Documents obtained by CNET News reveals the nature of China’s proposal which hoped to guarantee that the originator of digital information could be found. “The IP traceback mechanism is required to be adapted to various network environments, such as different addressing (IPv4 and IPv6), different access methods (wire and wireless) and different access technologies (ADSL, cable, Ethernet),” it reads. The document adds: “To ensure traceability, essential information of the originator should be logged.”
A second document alleged to be ITU property offers justifications for internet surveillance that are in line with the desires of repressive regimes:
“A political opponent to a government publishes articles putting the government in an unfavorable light. The government, having a law against any opposition, tries to identify the source of the negative articles but the articles having been published via a proxy server, is unable to do so protecting the anonymity of the author.”
To date it appears that the documents are being produced by five different editors under the auspices of the ITU. These editors include: NSA’s Richard Brackney, Tian Huirong from China’s telecommunications ministry, Korea’s Youm Heung-Youl, Cisco’s Gregg Schudel, and Craig Schultz, an employee for a Japanese-based network security firm.
In defense of the supremely frightening model the Q6/17 group proposes, the ITU is quick to remind inquirers that not all participating governments are behind the proposal. Yet beyond the detail trickling into the hands of the public, the ITU and constituent members remain tremendously tight-lipped about the inner workings of the new UN subcommittee. Numerous investigations into the processes behind the secretive group results in refusals and dismissals.
Research into the origins of Q6/17 reveals that prior submissions to the ITU, IETF and CERT from various nations spurred the development of the group to refine the proposals into a cogent system. While the UN has no authority to implement internet policy, backers of the Q6/17 group certainly do.
Privacy experts are concerned about the tremendous implications of the program. They remain unsatisfied by explanations that the program is for law enforcement when the ethics of the law varies wildly depending on the disposition of its authority. That aside, privacy and security experts question the efficacy of the system. Jacob Appelbaum, a developer for the Tor anonymity program remained unconvinced that it would ever catch criminal activity. “If such a system was deployed, it would be heavily abused by precisely those people that it would supposedly trace. No blackhat would ever be caught by this,” he said.
As the Q6/17 program evolves, a bevy of privacy concerns will no doubt go unaddressed as governments freshly-interested in deanomymization move towards finalizing the new specification.
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