Re: EU Official: IP Is Personal

["Tim Franklin" <tim () pelican org>]

On Fri, January 25, 2008 6:33 am, Owen DeLong wrote:

> In order to be using the license plate, you had to be physically present
> in the car.

Or in any car displaying the same identifier.

> In order to be on the telephone number, you (almost always) need to be
> present at the site where that phone number is terminated.

Or calling from any line that presents the same identifier.  It's
generally true that if you're calling from a POTS line (or BRI, for the
most part), you'll either present correct CLI, or some flavour of
'unavailable' or 'witheld'.

Start buying PRI service, however, and there's not a shortage of telcos
where you can inject whatever CLI you like.  BCP38 is no more universal in
the phone network than it is in the IP one.

> I don't know about your IP addresses, but, people can use my IP addresses
>  from a number of locations which are nowhere near the jurisdiction in
> which my network operates, so, I don't really see the correlation here
> with license plates or phone numbers.

I'm not clear if you mean legitimately here, or not.  If you've authorised
people to relay traffic through you in some way, you'd be the right first
contact.  If you're talking about unauthorised spoofing, it's a lot like
the first two cases (I'd say a fair bit easier / cheaper than the second,
not substantially more so than the first).

Those looking to reach a person should be aware of the possibility that
any of these presented identifiers could be forged.  That doesn't mean
that the owner of the identifier isn't a useful person to talk to in the
first instance - and hence they all, to a first approximation, function as
personal identifiers.

Regards,
Tim.