Re: Michigan First With A Law That Could Outlaw VPNs

Various people wrote claiming that Michigan has a law that outlaws VPNs. Before people go all alarmist about this, I think they should go read the actual law in question here:

http://www.michiganlegislature.org/mileg.asp?page=getObject&objName=mcl-750-540c-amended

There's nothing in here about IPsec. There is some stupid stuff here about attempting to illegally decrypt stuff. Probably that's intended to cover cable de-scramblers. Conceivably it could cover attempts to break WEP - if you're going to get upset about it, at least get upset over the right bad part.

There is stuff here about "concealing" ones origin. What exactly that means is up to the courts - there's no point in reading more into the law than that. I think the text was written to give law enforcement more teeth with which to pursue people such as Ralsky. VPNs and NATs could simply be regarded as mechanisms to handle routing issues and scarce IP address issues -- both legitimate and nothing to do with concealment at all. I don't know of anything that requires one to *identify* one's point of origin per se -- so address mapping in itself can't be an issue. It's still badly worded, and there's a chance the court decision could be too broadly interpreted with bad results.

For those who are curious; Michigan has term limits. A lot of them expired last year -- so something like 2/3rds of the legislature are brand new at it. Michigan also has a strong telecommuniations lobby -- so the text of this law was probably intended to favour Ameritech and Comcast. You can thank the Republicans for term limits.

Personally, in the wake of 9/11, I'm amazed that there hasn't been more bad stuff passed that affects telecommunications.

Very little of this (except perhaps the wep stuff) has anything to do with OpenBSD.

                                        -Marcus Watts Received on Mon Mar 31 18:58:13 2003

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