[arin-discuss] Legacy RSA

Mon Nov 5 20:09:07 EST 2007

On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> >On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Internet Partners, Inc. Tech Support wrote:
> >> 
> >> Dean, I agreed with you in general on VON but the horse is dead.
> >> Have you ever considered the possibility that ARIN Management simply
> >> doesen't know what shows to go to?
> >
> >This isn't a one-time mistake. It appears to be a $400,000+ mistake.
> 
> It couldn't have cost $400,000 to fly 2 guys from CA to Boston to host
> a booth at VON.  You have to be kidding, there has to be something else
> that the line item is paying for.

I guess I wasn't clear. One conference would be a one-time mistake.  
The one conference I cited was the one where I had some personal
experience to relate. But I understand they've been at VON several
times.  There are apparently other trips under the banner of
'educational outreach'. These add up to a $1.2 million dollar travel
item; approximately $400,000 more the prior year's travel expenses. If
they are all as educational as this VON conference, then none of them
are legitimate. The Nanog transfer was also asserted to be "educational
outreach".  These are not genuine efforts at education, but junkets. In
the case of Nanog, assistance to cronies of Board Members.

So, it seems that Board Members overlook ARIN employee junkets, and ARIN
staff overlook the unjustified transfers to Nanog and Board Member
cronies.  One scratches the other's back, both obtain benefits, and
Members lose.  This is what you hire managers to prevent, and why you
fire them when these things are uncovered.  Board Members also have
fiduciary duties; they are supposed to act in the interests of the
membership and ensure that the corporation employees carry out the
purposes (and only the purposes) of the corporation. The Board of
Directors are also supposed to have an arms-length supervisory
relationship with the management. Board members should not be doing
things that employees would ordinarily do.

We also have ARIN engaging in extortion of Legacys, as I described
previously. This relates to other similar activity, and to an ARIN Board
Member previously accused in Court of, among other things, extortion and
organized crime, for which a Temporary Restraining Order was issued.

Let me try to put some perspective on the issue with some background:

Who's who (abbreviated):
---------

Paul Vixie is an ARIN Board Member. 

Bill Woodcock is an ARIN Board Member and NANOG Program Committee
member.  

Bill Manning is an ARIN Board Member and a past NANOG Program Committee
member.  Manning has also helped Vixie/ISC avoid responsibility for
SORBS support.  http://www.iadl.org/bm/bill-manning-story.html This page
needs to be updated, Vixie has since moved SORBS to Dave Rand's
bungi.com network.

Rodney Joffe is a NANOG Program Committee member. Joffe is also the
founder of Whitehat.com a spam operation. Prior to founding Whitehat,
Joffe worked for American Computer Group, Mailorder.com, a junk postal
mail services company.  Vixie was (may still be--they've removed the
Board of Directors from the web site) a board member of Whitehat.  
Joffe currently works for NeuStar, a company that provides services to
VON.

Martin Hannigan. NANOG Email List Management Committee, ARIN AC member. 

Ed Lewis (NeuStar) supports ARIN booth at VON.  NeuStar provides
services to VON and has sponsored NANOG.

Keith Mitchell is a NANOG Program Committee member who works for Paul
Vixie on NANOG.

Chris Morrow, NANOG Program Committee. Recently appointed Chair of IETF 
GROW WG. The GROW WG is in charge of a draft promoting DNS Root Anycast, 
promoted by Vixie.

Dave Rand co-founded MAPS with Vixie. It seems the 'old MAPS gang' is
back together on SORBS.

Robert Seastrom is an ARIN AC member and a prominent Nanog member engaged
in "Nanog Futures". Seastrom's company (Cambridge Bandwidth Consortium)
is promoted by Paul Vixie at http://www.vix.com/personalcolo/, though
Seastrom appears to have moved on from there.
http://www.cambridge.bandwidth-consortium.us/

Dean Anderson is the President of the League for Programming Freedom,
and the owner of Av8 Internet, Inc, member of ARIN, member of ISOC. 

So we have three board members who have close interests in NANOG,
including one with previous TRO with very disturbing claims. And we have
a rather interesting circle of interests and cronies involving ARIN
Board Members and NANOG.  John Curran is also a participant in NANOG.

What is NANOG and What it is Doing? 
----------------------------------

Someone also asked me what Nanog is.  NANOG is "North American Network
Operators Group". It has a web page at http://www.nanog.org.  I have a
web page on the group at http://www.iadl.org/nanog/nanog-story.html

Nanog is a group of about 50 or so core members with several hundred
more transient members (people who post to the list or attend meetings
for a few years or less). It ostensibly claims to educate network
operations staff, but it is really a political or business operation
that just promotes the business interests of the core members.

Nanog has been involved in promoting the notion that network operators
can read customers email, suppressing anyone who disputed this notion
(e.g. myself).  This has been used to in spam operations.  Prominent
participants, Paul Vixie and Rodney Joffe et al, have run a spam
blacklist (MAPS, SORBS, Spamhaus) and also run a spam company called
Whitehat (www.whitehat.com).  So, they block their competition with
MAPS/SORBS, send spam from that isn't blocked, and through NANOG
encourage network operators to (illegally) read customer emails and
report on the activities of their competition.

Vixie and company basically just stole Sanford Wallace's business plan.  
Wallace was a well-know spammer in the late 90s, and also sold anti-spam
software.  Vixie represented himself as a 'radical' anti-spammers. For
example, Vixie wrote about spam that "the war won't be over until the
last spammer's head is stuck onto a spear at the city limits.". A very
extreme and brutal statement. Meanwhile, Vixie and prominent
anti-spammers John Levine and Ray Everett-Church were a board members of
privately held Whitehat.  Board members in privately held companies are
often the major investors, but I don't know for who owns Whitehat.

In 1997, Martin Hannigan, Hannigan advertised routes disrupting 
Wallace's network access. Whitehat was unaffected.

In the 1990s, Anderson disputed false claims on NANOG that, for example,
the Electronic Communications Privacy Act does not apply to ISPs.
Anderson was threatened with violence and silenced on NANOG for holding
reasonable viewpoints.

In 2001, Vixie was found with sufficient facts in Exactis v. MAPS to
warrant a Temporary Restraining Order(TRO) for anti-trust violation,
intentional and negligent misrepresentation and extortion, Colorado
Organized Crime Control Act, et al. MAPS responded with a First
Amendment argument that was rejected. After their lawyer was chastised,
they settled with Exactis. This TRO appears to be sufficient
justification to label all involved as being suspected of ties to
organized crime.

In 2003, it was discovered (SpamKings, 2003) that MAPS employees were
working for uber spammer Scott Richter (optinrealbig.com) doing
listwashing, that is, removing spam-trap email addresses from his spam
lists.

So after Anderson was vindicated on the ECPA and Anti-trust issues,
Vixie/SORBS et al retaliated by falsely stating that networks announced
by Av8 Internet (198.3.136/21 and 130.105/16)  are hijacked. After
criticism on ARIN's PPML mailing list, Vixie has since moved SORBS to
Dave Rand's bungi.com network. Vixie then claimed to have never hosted
SORBS.

In 2003, Chris Morrow (Nanog Steering Committee) published routes
disrupting AV8 Internet 198.3.136/21 network, repeating Hannigan's act
against Wallace.  This was during a 'hijacking' dispute and after Morrow
had the documents proving the networks were properly transferred; AFTER
ARIN were involved; and AFTER Lawyers for UUnet and AV8 were involved.
Morrow said that he couldn't reach Anderson by phone and that he needed
to disrupt the network "to get [Anderson's] attention", although Morrow
had contacted Anderson by phone before. After lawyers are involved,
Morrow should have contacted his lawyer, not Anderson directly.  
Anderson contact UUnet's lawyer, who had not authorized Morrow's
disruption.  Intentionally damaging a computer in Interstate Commerce is
a criminal offense.

In 2007, Morrow was abruptly placed in charge of the IETF GROW (Global
Routing) Working Group. There is usually a call for volunteers, and
qualified volunteers are selected. Morrow has no previous experience
with the IETF or the GROW WG.  Morrow works in customer security and
previously worked as UUnet Postmaster. The GROW WG is in charge a
controversial DNS Root Anycast Document.

In 2004, Nanog participant JA Terranson (formerly SAVVIS) and Spamhaus
extorted SAVVIS into terminating its CAN-SPAM compliant emailers.  
http://www.iadl.org/JATerranson/JATerranson-story.html Terranson was
fired after disclosing confidential customer information to Spamhaus.
Spamhaus doesn't block Whitehat, though. Dave Rand (Vixie partner in
MAPS) supports Spamhaus.

Most recently, NANOG has been involved in promoting the controversial
notion that stateful Anycast is stable. Anycast is the technique of
assigning the same IP address to two or more computers, and is described
by RFC1546.  RFC1546 specifically says that Anycast will only work for
stateless services.  Vixie and some other root DNS server operators have
begun selling Root DNS Anycast services to ISPs. DNS is mostly
stateless, but Root DNS server operators have to perform TCP DNS
services, which are stateful. See
http://www.av8.net/IETF-watch/DNSRootAnycast/History.html

Anderson was silenced in May, 2005 for posting 3rd party statistical
data on SORBS and for disputing claims made by Vixie about Anycast.

There are other scams that I won't list here.

Nanog also posted a financial 'update' for 2006.
http://www.nanog.org/budget/financial-updates.pdf Revenue was about
$181k and posted a loss of about $38k. This loss was covered by ARIN's
$50k donation.  ARIN made up almost a third of the NANOG budget.  NANOG
is a VERY small organization.

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