[Community-Discuss] Questions

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <6.2.5.6.2.20201222223854.12349470 at elandnews.com>, 
"S. Moonesamy" <sm+af at afrinic.net> wrote:


>There was a complaint related to a request for access to "Whois 

>data".  It is more difficult to reach agreement when there isn't a 

>common understanding of the regulatory constraints.  Some of the 

>data, which is categorized as "personal data" [1], is regulated 

>through data protection laws.  There is, for example, the Data 

>Protection Act 2017 for Mauritius, which is applicable.


I thank "S. Moonesamy" <sm+af at afrinic.net> for at least attempting
to make some pretense of addressing this issue, which I have raised,
however it is easy to demonstrate that this response is silly in the
extreme.

Apparently the "applicable" Mauritian law DOES NOT prevent AFRINIC
from publishing, via its traditional port 43 WHOIS service, the names,
addresses, and phone numbers (PII) associated with person: records
that are currently present in the data base... a fact that anyone
can easily verify just by querying the WHOIS for the handle associated
with any person: record.

Despite this obvious fact, the community is asked to believe that somehow,
magically, Mauritian law DOES prevent AFRINIC from providing this same
data to qualified and well-vetted researchers if the data from two or
more person: records is provided at the same time (bulk) or if the
data associated with a person: record that was removed fom the data base
last week (historical) is provided.

These alleged constraints, which allegedly spring from Mauritian law,
are in fact just ridiculous double-talk, made up within the minds of
S. Moonesamy and others within the current AFRINIC hierarchy, who are
just simply searching for some vaguely plausible excuse to prevent
any independent investigators, such as myself, from finding the whole
truth of what has happened in the data base, over time.

There is no basis in law for this.  AFRINIC and S. Moonesamy are simply
stonewalling.

It is left as an exercise for the reader as to why they would wish to do
that.


Regards,
rfg