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Message-ID: <200308280040.01604.thomas.greene@theregister.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 00:40:01 -0700
From: "Thomas C. Greene " <thomas.greene@...register.co.uk>
To: bugtraq@...urityfocus.com, full-disclosure@...ts.netsys.com
Subject: JAP service un-backdoored
http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/32533.html
Net anonymity service un-backdoored
Higher court hits pause button
The Java Anonymous Proxy (JAP) service, a collaborative effort of Dresden
University of Technology, Free University Berlin and the Independent Centre
for Privacy Protection Schleswig-Holstein, Germany (ICPP), has been allowed
to suspend its monitoring of users' IP traffic pending a decision on the
legality of back-dooring it.
Collectively known as the AN.ON Project, the operators appealed a lower
court's decision allowing the German Feds to obtain reports on users' access
to a particular IP address (no doubt having to do with KP or bomb-making,
etc).
The appeals court has allowed the operators to discontinue logging until their
appeal has been answered. When a decision has been reached, the JAP team says
they will document the whole affair, but cannot do so until the court issues
its ruling.
A single record of access to the forbidden IP address has been logged but not
yet disclosed to the Feds pending the higher court's decision, the JAP team
says.
In a previous article The Register criticised the way the JAP team handled its
initial confrontation with the Feds, ie., by waiting quietly until a user
discovered the back door before acknowledging the situation.
We believe there were better ways of dealing with the court order, either by
posting a prominent warning that the service might be subject to monitoring
by the authorities, by leaking the information to the press outside Germany,
or by disabling the affected proxies temporarily in protest.
We hope that if the JAP team should lose its appeal and be ordered to resume
monitoring, particularly under a gag order, it will find a way of giving the
public a proper heads up. Their previous performance hardly inspires
confidence, but there is always opportunity for redemption. ®
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