Last month, Lawrence Lessig mentioned his fears of the possibility of an iPatriot Act.  Today, the UN wants to make this come to fruition.

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

China?  Seriously?

The potential for eroding Internet users’ right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates. Also affected may be services such as the Tor anonymizing network.

Except the federal government has already set honeypots and sniffing at the exits of Tor, so that’s not really a good alternative right now anyway.

Nearly everyone agrees that there are, at least in some circumstances, legitimate security reasons to uncover the source of Internet communications. The most common justification for tracebacks is to counter distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks.

Correct.  And there are ways of doing this now.

But implementation details are important, and governments participating in the process — organized by the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency — may have their own agendas. A document submitted by China this spring and obtained by CNET News said the “IP traceback mechanism is required to be adapted to various network environments, such as different addressing (IPv4 and IPv6), different access methods (wire and wireless) and different access technologies (ADSL, cable, Ethernet) and etc.” It adds: “To ensure traceability, essential information of the originator should be logged.”

This essentially means that anything anyone says that might counter the current administration in a country is subject to be “detained” and “questioned” for their unloyal behavior.  Really, China is helping this sort of thing along.  You won’t be able to hide behind Tor or any other kind of proxy or anonymizer.

By itself, of course, the U.N. has no power to impose Internet standards on anyone. But U.N. and ITU officials have been lobbying for more influence over the way the Internet is managed, most prominently through the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia and a followup series of meetings.

No one really knows what is going to happen.  The proposal isn’t due to be finished until 2009, the UN doesn’t really have any power to implement this by itself, and not everyone in the group is in favor of it.

“When NSA takes the lead on standard-setting, you have to ask yourself how much is about security and how much is about surveillance,” said the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Rotenberg. “You would think (the ITU) would be a little more sensitive to spying on Internet users with the cooperation of the NSA and the Chinese government.”

Yes, a normal person would think this way.  These guys that want this, I’m not so sure about it.

What I hate about this proposal is that I am allowed, by law, to look at whatever I want online (except kiddie porn, but those bastards…well, that’s for another time).  They want to change this so that even innocent people are tracked.  I want the law to stay as it is.  If I want to go read some nutjob religious wackos‘ site, I can.  If I want to read about why George Bush might be the anti-christ, I can.  If I want to look at tubgirl, goatse (not that I would.  Once of each was enough to burn the images forever in my brain.) or any other shock site, I can.  If I want to surf porn (gay, straight, or farm) I can.   This is my legal right.  No government should be able to tell me that I can’t look at any site online for any reason.  I should not have to fear that I will have a file with said government, which could get me into trouble.  This could range from lack of employment opportunities to being denied the ability to fly around the world.

Stick this proposal where the sun doesn’t shine and stop thinking we like be treated like children.