Out-Law newsletter says IWF "was wrong to lift its ban on a Wikipedia page"

[Florian Weimer]

* Ian Batten:

> It's an interesting question.  What stops me (now there's no concept
> of annex two telephony licenses, nor any `fit and proper person'
> tests) buying a few second-hand switches, renting fibre between the
> exchanges, unbundling with MPF and offering cheap calls to everyone
> else in the areas I serve?

You don't need to buy any fibre, I think.  You probably can buy
accounting and billing, too.  In short, you might not need any
infrastructure whatsoever.  (This could be different in the UK,
though.)

> The areas in which, by a handy coincidence, my criminal confederates
> (vide supra) are based, this being in fact SMERSH telco?  I'd be
> happy to receive --- and perhaps even process --- interception
> warrants, because I'd be glad to know which of my confederates were
> suspects and which weren't.  My intent wouldn't be to provide
> interception-free calls: why do I need that?  My intent would be to
> have the telco act as a canary in a mineshaft, cluing me in on who
> was being watched...

Well, this is an interesting twist, but I was more concerned with
illegal activities which won't result in wiretapping, like dialer
fraud, cold calling, automated harassment services, and so on.  For
the first two, running your own telco has some advantages because you
can make things harder to trace, on the phone and money sides.  If you
buy into the absolute defense argument, it will be extremely difficult
to stop this activity.

Setting up your own fake ISP appears to be quite common, too.  These
cases tend to be more visible because Internet routing is leaky, and
phone routing isn't.