A recent blog post on the Emergent Chaos Blog caught my eye. This post was about Ethics and seeing as how we had a pretty good discussion here recently on that subject I thought I’d take a look see. The article cited another blog post by Chris Soghoian concerning some research conducted at the University of Colorado and the University of Washington on the Tor anonymous proxy network.
Apparently these researchers conducted their research in two phases. The first phase constituted capturing the first 150 bytes of each packet that transverse their server to analyze what kind of traffic it was. The second phase examined the source IP address to determine the country of origin. The research can be found at this link and it was presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium held on Wednesday (23 July 2008) in Leuven Belgium.
The questions raised in both of these blogs was whether the research was ethical and legal. Apparently it may be a violation of the U.S. Wiretap Act . Now I’m not a lawyer and in no way can give legal advice on the interpretation of the act. I have read the law and it appears to me that Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 119 §2511 (2)(g) which says:
It shall not be unlawful under this chapter or chapter 121 of this title for any person-(i) to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public;
May either provide relief to the researchers or condemn them depending upon how the courts have interpreted it. On one hand servers on the Tor Network are open to the public but for the intent to anonymize a Tor user’s communication as well as their physical location. If the communication system is public but the communication itself is not does that apply? I can see an argument if the communication is in some way encrypted but what if it is sent in the open?
What impact could that have on research? Is this type of research ethical?
Any thoughts?
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