[ppml] Comment on "Policy Proposal 2006-1" (Residential Privacy modification)

On Oct 9, 2006, at 1:24 AM, Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:

>>> What legitimate research need requires more than this?
>>>
>> Research which cares whether you are talking about Peoria, AZ or
>> Peoria, IL, or
>> Peoria, IN for starters.
>
> That is not a definition of LEGITIMATE research.
> Consider a terrorist who is doing some research to
> identify the locality of a hated person in order to
> launch a poison gas attack in that locality.
>
No, it's not a definition, but, it is a description of why the  
information
is useful.  There are MANY forms of legitimate research which
care about which state a given city is in.

These could include research into geographic distribution of
traffic patterns hitting a given web site, geographic distribution
of traffic traversing a link (to determine optimal location of  
additional
exchange points, for example), etc.

> Yes, that is research but it is not legitimate
> research that ARIN and its members would wish
> to support.
>
Any resource or data that is published can be used for legitimate or
nefarious purposes. The mere fact that someone may be doing something
nefarious is not a reason to stop publishing the data.  Do you want
to stop publishing encyclopedias because they contain information
that could be used to build weapons?

Data which has only nefarious use should (usually) not be published.
Data which has both legitimate and nefarious use should (usually) be
published. Data which has only legitimate use is rare, if it exists  
at all.

Owen

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