August 2, 2010
An Open Letter
To: Everyone who works to make the Internet a Better Place
Dear Sir/Madam,
We are writing this letter on behalf of the incident response team CERT NIC.LV run by the Registry of the country code Top Level Domain .lv (NIC.LV) – the Network Solutions Department of the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia.
This letter was motivated by our recent conflict with the Spamhaus project, the international non-profit organisation that has the mission to track the Internet’s spam operations and to provide dependable real-time anti-spam protection (hereinafter referred to as Spamhaus).
CERT NIC.LV strongly believes that:
- No-one can be declared a criminal other than according to the law, i.e. after a fair trial at court with the right to appeal;
- No Internet user should be punished for the actions of another Internet user. As nations around the globe recognise that access to the Internet is basic human right it is unacceptable to block access of those who have not committed any illegal or improper acts;
- In fighting undesirable and potentially criminal activities on the Internet we must avoid using questionable means to stop wrongdoers;
- All countries, companies or individuals should be treated equally and not be discriminated against for reasons of size, level of income, position or any other characteristics.
We believe that deviation from these basic principles will not make the Internet a safer or more secure place.
In fulfilling their mission Spamhaus appears to disregard these principles; disregard commonly accepted CERT community best practice and disregard basic legal principles. The consequence of their actions is to put the basic rights of thousands of law-abiding Internet users at risk.
In the light of our conflict with Spamhaus (as documented in the report attached to this letter) we invite members of the community and other interested stakeholders to strongly reject the unfair and unreasonable behaviour of Spamhaus. We think it is time to appoint an independent adjudicator to mediate on issues of disagreement between Spamhaus (or any other entity exercising its power in an unjust way) and the user community. Whilst we do not support spam or any other illegal activity in any form it remains our mission to protect the rights of law-abiding users. We hope that the community will not stand aside.
NIC.LV thanks everyone who helped in solving the situation when our IP addresses were wrongly blocked by Spamhaus. NIC.LV is willing and ready to participate in any activities which would lead to a fair handling of incidents and, as a result, to the safer and more secure Internet.
Sincerely,
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Katrina Sataki
Manager of NIC.LV
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Baiba Kaškina
Manager of CERT NIC.LV
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Full text and all the details are here.
