Enforcing the CDA improperly may pervert Internet architecture
The attached paper by Dr. Reed is worth reading -- I haven't seen this argument raised before. One portion that I found fascinating was: "It is quite silly to imagine that the Ascend router at the ISP can figure out if it is me or my child generating each packet." But that's exactly what the defenders of the CDA are claiming! Here's some background that might be interesting: When I was arguing with Bruce Taylor (an architect of the CDA) last week, we went 'round and 'round on the issue of children on the Net, as usual. He maintained that every Internet user has to have an account somewhere, so that account provider is able to tag accounts as minor or adult. To the best of my ability, I pointed out some of the technical problems with this, and he responded (I paraphrase from memory here) that technical problems can be solved by technical people: "Your side comes across to the court as saying that it can be done but we won't do it. You're a bunch of geeks who want to protect their porn and the court isn't going to buy it." He brought up IP Version 6, which the DoJ has focused on in cross-examination of one of our witnesses, Scott Bradner from the IETF: 13 Q Would it be fair to say, to summarize what you've just 14 said, that the IP Next Generation group is working on a new 15 generation of the IP Protocol itself? 16 A That is correct. 17 Q Does it have -- does the IP Next Generation group have 18 recommendations regarding a specific architecture of the 19 packet traffic on the Internet, including the format of the 20 packet? The DoJ and Taylor are going to argue that IP V6 can include such an adult/minor tag in each datagram! One of their key witnesses is Dan Olsen, the head of the computer science department at Brigham Young University and the incoming director of the Human Computer Interaction Institute at CMU. Olsen's background is NOT in distributed computing environments and protocol design -- but that minor detail notwithstanding, it looks like he'll be testifying this Friday that such a tagging scheme is technically possible. Chris Hansen from the ACLU told me last Friday: "Olsen is going to push this tagging idea that the government has, that you can imbed in your tag -- in your address -- an adult or minor tag. They're going to suggest that the market will come into existence that will make that tagging relevant." Comments? -Declan --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Enforcing the CDA Improperly May Pervert Internet Architecture by David P. Reed Friends - I'd like to call your attention to a situation where misguided politics (of the "ends-justify-means" sort) threatens one of the fundamental principles of Internet architecture, in a way that seems like a slippery slope. I do not normally take public stands of a political nature, and I do not participate much in Internet architecture anymore, but I'd like to call your attention to a very severe perversion of the Internet architectural philosophy that is being carried out in the name of political and commercial expediency. No matter what you believe about the issues raised by the Communications Decency Act, I expect that you will agree that the mechanism to carry out such a discussion or implement a resolution is in the agreements and protocols between end users of the network, not in the groups that design and deploy the internal routers and protocols that they implement. I hope you will join in and make suggestions as to the appropriate process to use to discourage the use of inappropriate architectural changes to the fundamental routing architecture of the net to achieve political policy goals. As you know, I am one of the authors, along with Saltzer and Clark, of the paper "End-to-end arguments in decentralized computer systems", which first characterized in writing the primary approach to the Internet's architecture since it was conceived, which approach arguably has been one of the reasons for its exponential growth. This philosophy - avoid building special functionality into the net internals solely to enforce an end-to-end policy - has led to the simplicity, low cost, and radical scalability of the Internet. One of the consequences is that IP routers do not enforce policies on a packet-by-packet basis, so routers can be extremely simple beasts, compared to the complex beasts that characterize even the simplest telephone central office switch. End-to-end policies are implemented by intelligence at the ends (today, the PCs and servers that communicate over the many consolidated networks that make up the Internet). I just read in Inter@ctive Week (March 25, 1996) that Livingston plans to announce an "Exon box" - a router that is designed to enable ISPs to restrict access to "indecent sites" or unrated sites unless an "adult" enters an authorization code when opening a session to enable the router to transmit packets to the site. The scam seems to be that Livingston has colluded with Senator Exon's staff to propose a "solution" to enable ISP's to implement parental controls. Exon's staff is using the announced solution as an example to demonstrate how simply ISPs can enforce local community standards and parental controls, thus supporting interpretations of the CDA requiring all access providers to include such capability in their boxes. Exon's staff is quoted as encouraging ISP's to install such functionality into the routers that serve as access points for nets. Since I use an Ascend P50 ISDN router to make frequent, short, bandwidth-on-demand ISDN connections from my "Family LAN" to an Ascend multi-line ISDN router at my commercial Internet Service Provider, I am worried that this model is completely unworkable for me, and for others that will eventually use such a practical system. My family has minor children and adults who all happily access the Internet. My ISP has no clue whatsoever whether a child or adult has initiated the call, and in fact, if my child and I are both on different computers in different rooms, it is quite silly to imagine that the Ascend router at the ISP can figure out if it is me or my child generating each packet. It is appalling to me that Livingston, which has some responsibility as a router provider to assist in the orderly growth of the net, is pandering to Exon's complete misunderstanding of how the Internet is built. I would hope that Ascend, with its much larger share of the ISP market, and other router companies such as Cisco and Bay Networks, would take a principled and likely popular position that the "Exon box" is not the way to go about this. I would hope that ISP's would in general avoid use of Livingston's products, and also refuse to cave into Exon's pressure. I believe, though I may be wrong, that Livingston has contributed to the RADIUS technology that many ISP's use to manage dialup access charging in a way that is consistent with ethe end-to-end philosophy, but any credit they are due is overwhelmed by the Exon box insanity. I do work to protect my children from inappropriate material, but pressure from Senators to mandate technically flawed solutions, and opportunistic, poorly thought-through technologies from companies like Livingston are not helpful. If you agree, please join me in attempting to call off any tendency for other router vendors and protocol designers to develop Exon box features. It would seem that the appropriate place for content restrictions, such as "parental controls", are in the end-to-end agreements between content providers and their users, not in the internal switching architecture of the net. - David P. Reed Notes: The end-to-end paper was edited and republished in several forms (with slight variations in title), generalizing its observations to systems beyond the distributed systems that were its original focus; the final and most accessible one is: Saltzer, J.H., D.P. Reed, and D.D. Clark, End-To-End Arguments in System Design. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 1984. 2(4) p. 277-288. I don't have any more details on Livingston's technology or its marketing plans than what was presented in Inter@ctive Week. The Inter@ctive Week article apparently based its information on 'sources' describing a planned announcement, and also quoted Exon's staff. It is possible that Livingston will choose not to announce or position its technology in this form. It seems less likely that Exon's staff will change its position on forcing ISP's to adopt some kind of technological solution, however. - David [After considering Dr. Reed's comments, I asked him whether he objects to firewalls in general. His reply: No, I think firewalls of the sort now deployed can be OK (e.g., packet filters), as a minimal line of defense. However, they are inherently flawed, in ways that are well understood (reading Cheswick and Bellovin gives good insight here). Most security threats ultimately require end-to-end policies and must be implemented with end-to-end solutions. As the paper points out, sometimes one can optimize cost of implementing and end-to-end solution by including some functionality that is not end-to-end. Firewalls may reduce the cost. --CEL]
There are more details about Livingston's Exon Box (they call it ChoiceNet) available at http://www.livingston.com/Marketing/Press/choicenet_press.html . My kneejerk reaction was to hate this thing too, but now I'm not so sure. If I was responsible for the Internet connectivity for a K-12 school system, I would want this capability in a big way. I see the Livingston product as an enabling technology. The obvious associated risk is Big Brother deciding, "If one router CAN do it, then every router MUST do it!" The idea of having a Naughty_Enabled Bit in IPv6 is, of course, even worse; but I'm glad it isn't my job to exlpain why it is horrid to a Federal judge. Dan On Tue, 9 Apr 1996 02:51:19 -0400 (EDT) "Declan B. McCullagh" wrote: [ SNIP ]
Enforcing the CDA Improperly May Pervert Internet Architecture
by David P. Reed [ SNIP ] I just read in Inter@ctive Week (March 25, 1996) that Livingston plans to announce an "Exon box" - a router that is designed to enable ISPs to restrict access to "indecent sites" or unrated sites unless an "adult" enters an authorization code when opening a session to enable the router to transmit packets to the site.
-- Dan Marner dmarner@mis.nu.edu Network Weasel National University "Not on MY network!"
Declan B. McCullagh wrote:
The attached paper by Dr. Reed is worth reading -- I haven't seen this argument raised before. One portion that I found fascinating was:
"It is quite silly to imagine that the Ascend router at the ISP can figure out if it is me or my child generating each packet."
But that's exactly what the defenders of the CDA are claiming! Here's some background that might be interesting:
I sent a letter to the Economist last year pointing this out after reading an article containing the offhand statement, "... and of course it is entirely feasible to control Internet content" (or something like that). I don't have those magic two letters at the front of my name though. It seems so utterly obvious. When you connect to an ISP via PPP or SLIP, all the ISP is doing is routing packets.
Chris Hansen from the ACLU told me last Friday: "Olsen is going to push this tagging idea that the government has, that you can imbed in your tag -- in your address -- an adult or minor tag. They're going to suggest that the market will come into existence that will make that tagging relevant."
Uhh... what about the rather obvious problem that some of these new fangled computers can support an enormous spread of information? My web site at io.com has no offensive materials (though I recently rated it as basically "Satan's Headquarters" via SurfWatch), but other stuff at io.com may well be offensive. Packets routed out through io's interface will of course all come from the same address. Maybe they're suggesting that every disk block in the universe should have its own IP address. Hmm, maybe there's a use after all for those 24 byte OSI addresses... _____c_____________________________________________________________________ Mike M Nally * Tiv^H^H^H IBM * Austin TX * pain is inevitable m5@tivoli.com * m101@io.com * <URL:http://www.io.com/~m101> * suffering is optional
Mike McNally writes:
Declan B. McCullagh wrote:
The attached paper by Dr. Reed is worth reading -- I haven't seen this argument raised before. One portion that I found fascinating was:
"It is quite silly to imagine that the Ascend router at the ISP can figure out if it is me or my child generating each packet."
But that's exactly what the defenders of the CDA are claiming! Here's some background that might be interesting:
I sent a letter to the Economist last year pointing this out after reading an article containing the offhand statement, "... and of course it is entirely feasible to control Internet content" (or something like that). I don't have those magic two letters at the front of my name though. It seems so utterly obvious. When you connect to an ISP via PPP or SLIP, all the ISP is doing is routing packets.
Wait a second. I don't know that it's really as impossible as you think. Given the CDA advocates' hypothesis that anonymity is a Bad Thing (tm), it's reasonable for them to assume that the ISP can arrange to have a policy requiring that it know who's making the SLIP/PPP connection. It's not too hard to have *every* packet generated by a given connection flagged with an IP option indicating "adult" or "minor". It's not that different from the "Security Classification" option that's already in the IP spec. Incoming connections to a server are then already marked, leaving no excuses for servers that deliver contraband to such connections. The only technical problem comes when the SLIP/PPP link serves a mixed group of users, as described in Dr Reed's paper. In this case, I'd think the ISP would be responsible for verifying that the person requesting the "adult-flagged" service is really an adult, and *that* person is responsible for what happens to the data after it's delivered. It'd be no different from the case where an adult goes into an adult bookstore, buys contraband, and gives it to a minor. The bookstore isn't accountable. The argument that this is technically infeasible is hooey. This doesn't address the issue of whether it's a Good Thing (tm), though. Dr Reed argues that such end-to-end policies are best left out of the network layer, but admits that adding support to the network layer may reduce the implementation cost. It's still expensive, though, since all providers of indecent material and all participating ISPs have to upgrade their software. What possibilities does it leave for anonymity? ISPs that don't participate in the packet flagging might permit anonymous connections, since it's entirely up to the information provider whether to deliver the requested data. Adult content providers who deliver contraband to unflagged connections are asking for trouble.
Chris Hansen from the ACLU told me last Friday: "Olsen is going to push this tagging idea that the government has, that you can imbed in your tag -- in your address -- an adult or minor tag. They're going to suggest that the market will come into existence that will make that tagging relevant."
Uhh... what about the rather obvious problem that some of these new fangled computers can support an enormous spread of information? My web site at io.com has no offensive materials (though I recently rated it as basically "Satan's Headquarters" via SurfWatch), but other stuff at io.com may well be offensive. Packets routed out through io's interface will of course all come from the same address.
Given your position, io.com is only accessible to adults in the world of the CDA advocates. Just upgrade your IP software to refuse connections from minors. My response to the censors' position that too much stuff on the 'net is unsuitable for children is: "Keep 'em off the net, then." I'd rather have internet access by minors generally forbidden than have censorship.
Scott Brickner wrote:
Given your position, io.com is only accessible to adults in the world of the CDA advocates. Just upgrade your IP software to refuse connections from minors.
It's not "my" IP software. I pay io for an account. What you're saying is that every ISP would have to decide whether to be completely G-rated or else open to anybody. Sigh. That's probably what the CDA crowd wants. It's hard not to become consumed by hatred. ______c_____________________________________________________________________ Mike M Nally * Tiv^H^H^H IBM * Austin TX * pain is inevitable m5@tivoli.com * m101@io.com * <URL:http://www.io.com/~m101> * suffering is optional
Mike McNally writes:
Scott Brickner wrote:
Given your position, io.com is only accessible to adults in the world of the CDA advocates. Just upgrade your IP software to refuse connections from minors.
It's not "my" IP software. I pay io for an account. What you're saying is that every ISP would have to decide whether to be completely G-rated or else open to anybody.
Not necessarily. The ISP could provide a configuration mechanism for "self ratings" which the IP software would recognize. Mislabeling would be punishable the same way showing nekkid pictures of your wife to your neighbor's kid is.
Sigh. That's probably what the CDA crowd wants. It's hard not to become consumed by hatred.
Too true. I wish they'd grow up and realize that information is inherently harmless. "Sticks and stones may break my bones..."
participants (4)
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Dan Marner -
Declan B. McCullagh -
Mike McNally -
Scott Brickner