Hi Mel,
I'd expect ARIN to hold them to account for complying with ARIN rules,
if they are subject. In years gone by, I have been able to contact US
DoD organisations using published contact methods to address technical
issues. So even if there's technical non-compliance (which i'd agree
should be addressed), it could be a lot worse.
As for the DoD's accountability via your system of government, my view
would be that instead of bogon-filtering addresses legitimately
appearing in your BGP, with the justification being "they havn't
before!", you could consider asking them via channels. Like
https://open.defense.gov/transparency/foia.aspx for example. But i'm
not a citizen of the United States, so will happily plead ignorance as
to whether this is likely to lead you to what you want to know or not.
In my country the government is also accountable to the people. But that
doesn't mean I would expect an Internet Service Provider to deliberately
sabotage the network access of their customers, either. Starts to feel
like a net neutrality argument again.
Mark.
PS: If DoD make use of IP address space that they legitimately hold, i'm
not sure you can call it a civilian resource, despite it interacting
with civilian counterparts. Any consumable held by a military
organisation is a military resource and they'll make use of it based on
their operational requirements. The best comparison I could think of,
would be fuel (gasoline/petroleum/diesel/Jet-A1), all of which has both
military and civilian application.
On 25/04/2021 7:40 pm, Mel Beckman wrote:
Mark,
ARIN rules require every IP space holder to publish accurate — and effective —
Admin, Tech, and Abuse POCs. The DOD hasn’t done this, as I pointed out, and as
you can test for yourself. Your expectation that the DOD will “generally comply
with all of the expected norms” is sorely naive, and already disproven.
As far as “why does anyone on the Internet need to publish to your arbitrary
standards”, you seem to forget that in the U.S., the government is accountable
to the People. Where a private company may not have to explain its purposes,
the government most certainly does in the private sector. With these IP spaces
being thrust into the civilian realm, yes, they owe the citizenry an
explanation of their actions, just as they would if they had started mounting
missile launchers on highway overpasses. It’s a direct militarization of a
civilian utility.
Keep in mind that the U.S. Government — under all administrations — has shown that
it will abuse every technical advantage it can, as long as it can do so in secret.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten James Clapper, the former director of national
intelligence, who falsely testified to Congress that the government does “not
wittingly” collect the telephone records of millions of Americans. And he was just
the tip of the iceberg. Before Clapper under Obama there was the Bush
administration’s Stellar Wind" warrantless surveillance program. The list of
government abuse of civilian resources is colossal .
Fighting against that isn’t political. It’s patriotic.
-mel
On Apr 25, 2021, at 12:02 AM, Mark Foster <blak...@blakjak.net> wrote:
On 25/04/2021 3:24 am, Mel Beckman wrote:
This doesn’t sound good, no matter how you slice it. The lack of transparency
with a civilian resource is troubling at a minimum. I’m going to bogon this
space as a defensive measure, until its real — and detailed — purpose can be
known. The secret places of our government have proven themselves untrustworthy
in the protection of citizens’ data and networks. They tend to think they know
“what’s good for” us.
-mel
Why does anyone on the Internet need to publish to your arbitrary standards,
what they intend to do with their IP address ranges?
Failure to advertise the IP address space to the Internet (until now, perhaps)
doesn't make the address space any less legitimate, and though I'd expect the
DoD to generally comply with all of the expected norms around BGP arrangements
and published whois details, at the end of the day, they can nominate who
should originate it from their AS and as long as we can see who owns it....
it's just not our business.
Any organisation who's used DoD space in a way that's likely to conflict with,
well, the DoD, gambled and lost.
Mark.
