In the shadow blog I hide from comment and trackback spammers at k.lenz.name/discuss I got an interesting comment to my last post on FON coming to the rescue against the evil forces trying to set up a giant snooping operation.
That comment remarked that some politicians in Denmark are proposing to make it illegal to operate a Wifi allowing unauthenticated access.
I answered that this is only a proposal, and that in Germany current law says exactly the opposite.
Under German law, providers of Internet access have an obligation to enable anonymous access and payment, if that is technologically possible and can be reasonably expected, see Article 4, Paragraph 6 of the German Law on Data Protection in Teleservices (Teledienstdatenschutzgesetz), which covers providing Internet access, see Article 1 of the law and Article 2, Paragraph 2 Number 3 of the Law on Teleservices (Teledienstgesetz).
I also said that it would be unpracticable to operate a FON hotspot if you were obliged to verify the identity of users.
That might be wrong, since one can use the payment process (for example credit card payment) to get an identity for the users.
But if this kind of legislation is enacted, providing anonymous FON access would become illegal. That would kill the idea of using this network as a countermeasure against Internet surveillance, at least as a legal countermeasure. Black networks using some FON CLONE software, as described in "Unwirer" by Doctorow and Stross two years ago, would still be a possibility.
As long as providing anonymous Internet access over a Wifi connection is legal, or even (as under German law) an obligation for the provider, the idea is alive and kicking.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at November 27, 2005 11:40 AM