[discuss] global cyber sovereignty [was discuss Digest, Vol 3, Issue 67, etc.]

[S Moonesamy]

Hi JFC,
At 11:35 22-02-2014, JFC Morfin wrote:
>I think this issue is the only one where this list can really help 
>the Govs. that will meet in Sao Paulo. It concerns what we could 
>call "global cyber sovereignty". I will try to gather some elements 
>for common consideration.

[snip]

>2. Advent of Cyberspace
>
>With the advent of cyber space, it was naturally decided in 1978 and 
>accepted (cf. ICP-1) that the source of national cyber authority was 
>the ISO 3166 table of *territories* (not of sovereign states). The 
>rationale by then was either to divide the world:

There was a comment from Keith Davidson about ICP-I.

>Now, we observe that a territory (i.e. a part or the entire national 
>space) and a "state relational space" have many similarities. The 
>same for a territorial domain and a private relational 
>space.  Mokapetris who documented the DNS, called them "domains", a 
>TLD being a territory's general domain. So, we observe that the 
>Tymnet/PTT, the Internet, the DNS, and the general common practice 
>converge toward relational spaces that can be identified by domain 
>names, gathering people and machines that accept that "domain name" 
>for the domain of their structured relational space. In terms of 
>sovereignty, it means that sovereignty is attached to the space 
>supported by a relational support system/management structure. This 
>is what Jon Postel documented as a "NIC", network information center.

Please see my comments at the end of this message.

>This is a case we recently observed on Wikipedia in France. As a 
>result of Google's enforcement of its global rules, the French 
>privacy protection agency has been designated by the other European 
>agencies as their leader to study the resulting legal cases. The 
>French NSA equivalent summoned the President of MediaWiki France and 
>asked him to remove a page they considered as violating military 
>secrets. This was a test to understand (without lawyers 
>interference) how multinational structures would react. He explained 
>to them how to do it and removed the page. There was an uproar in 
>the MediaWiki community, and three hours later a Swiss lady restored the page.

The above seem related to the DCRI.

>root file manager. This means that even if "com" was managed in the 
>cloud by multiple masters or processes, or is foreign, the root 
>could be used to block a ".com" name. The plaintiff (here ICE) is, 
>therefore, entitled to ask an US Judge to impose VeriSign to load 
>the name associated to an ICE address in the root-file.

I consider the above as an unknown.

>The case did not occur yet. But nothing prevents it from being 
>raised. Except if extraterritoriality was granted to the root file.

There has been some studies about sovereignty, jurisdiction, 
etc.  The proposals I have read do not cite any of those studies.  It 
is difficult to establish the veracity of the historical information 
mentioned in the discussions.

There are articles at 
http://articles.latimes.com/2003/may/11/nation/na-nyt11 and 
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full  Nowadays, it is 
more and more difficult for the average person to determine whom to rely on.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy