[ale] firewalls, encryption & NAT to be illegal?

[hbbs at attbi.com]

In addition to the general unease that most all of us here seem to share about
this sort of legislation, I am starting to really have a problem with this
spreading notion of "illegal information" such as the NAT-HOWTO if NAT were made
illegal.  

I'm thinking about the DMCA-outlawed things like that guy's DVD descrambler -
how he printed it on a t-shirt (thereby making illegal clothing) and wrote a
haiku describing the procedure (illegal poetry).

Is the whole point to inure society to the notion of illegal information - to
expand what is considered non-protected speech?

- Jeff
> IANALE (either), but I gave it a quick scan.
> 
> It is way too vague.  One would hope that it would be written to apply to
> people tying to trick the cable company into thinking they have digital
> cable with a modded box, or blue boxes and the like, but there is way too
> much ambiguity.
> 
> If I NAT a connection, is that just being safe or obscuring the point of
> origin?   One could argue that the cable company would know that it came
> from my IP address.  If it came from the NAT device or a machine behind
> there, what difference does it make?   If I tried to make it look like it
> came from my  neighboors cable modem, that is when this law should apply.
> 
> One scary thing that stood out was that it makes illegal documentation on
> how to do all of this fraud stuff...so if this does include NAT, does the
> NAT-HOWTO now break the law?
> 
> In a perfect world a case would come along against a firewall/NAT user who
> had two machines, never used at the same time.  A good lawyer would show
> how the person never consumed more resources than paid for (only 1 IP in
> use, couldn't go over the capped bandwidth) and in addition, since the
> fw/NAT was in place, was actually making it safer to surf the net for
> their 10 year old.    To me that is too close to how cable TV goes.  It
> used to be that you were supposed to pay for each tv in the house and
> basically splitters were illegal and you could be fined.  Then the FCC or
> congress ruled that when the cable enters the house the cable company
> can't dictate what happens to it then (sure...they then offer premium
> stuff on only the digital cable, making sure they get a box out of you :)
> 
> Oh well...enough early morning ranting.  To summarize - not aimed at
> natting but has scary implications that it could be used that way due to
> bad wording.
> 
> 	-Dan
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