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| Domain Registrar's Under Fire For Allowing Anonymity |
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 The GlobeAndMail reports a somewhat misguided story about internet domain registrars, like Register and Tucows, allowing registrars to pay an additional fee that allows them to keep their registration records anonymous. In this age of decreasing privacy and increasing fraud, it is just a good idea. Consider that any 13 year old can WHOIS an open DNS record. In the article, the argument is being made that this helps terrorists stay anonymous, too. Now let us pretend to be a little rational. The last time we checked, you are innocent until proven guilty, at least in the U.S.. Espousing racist, terrorist FUD on a website does not make you a criminal, it merely makes you intolerant and stupid. Locked registrar records can be unlocked with a court order, as we well know. We have had to do this ourselves, after recieving threats from a nutcase last year. Do we give up the tenants of liberty and the rule of law because we are afraid of what the boogeyman might do? Benjamin Franklin put it succinctly;"those who would sacrifice a little liberty to obtane temporary safety deserve neither liberty, nor safety." People who use loopholes and weaknesses in law to stay hidden will always do so. People with criminal intent cannot be controlled by anything less than due diligence and hard work. It will always be this way. This is a fools argument, leveraging people's fear of the terrorist boogeyman to make an argument with no merit. The GlobeAndMail reports... This service is hugely popular: Civil-liberties advocates and anyone else who values their privacy flock to it. But it's also very useful to another group of people, halfway around the globe: On one of the world's largest pro-Hamas websites, viewers can download martyrdom videos that feature the diatribes of masked men shortly before they launch deadly attacks. Look up the registration info for that site, and you'll get that Yarmouth address and phone number. The challenge this situation poses is not unprecedented. Years ago, authorities noticed that child pornography websites, though often operated from outside North America, made use of North American anonymous-registration services. In response, a large number of watchdog groups began hunting down such sites to force the registration firms to shut them down. “There's nothing near that level [of public monitoring] with terrorist websites,” says Wade Deisman, Director of the National Security Working Group at the University of Ottawa. Government intelligence services don't have the resources to manage the scale of the problem. “I haven't seen anything that comes even close to addressing this issue,” he says. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           
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