DCMS/DSIT continues to deny the public access to its communications with the member organisation and UK government granted monopoly Nominet UK: this time on on the grounds of national security. For background see this earlier post DCMS vs ICO case IC-165170-X2F6.
I act for DSIT, and write in relation to the above decision notice made by the ICO on 21 March 2023.
I am writing to notify you that DSIT filed an appeal against this decision notice, and is waiting to hear back from the Tribunal.
My understanding of procedure is that once the Tribunal has received and processed the appeal papers, it will notify the ICO of the appeal (as the Respondent), and that it will also notify you – and enquire as to whether you wish to apply to be a Second Respondent to the appeal. Therefore, I will let the ordinary process run its course in this respect.
However, I can state now that DSIT will be relying on s24 of FOIA in the appeal. DSIT does not seek to apply s24 to all of the disputed information.
Therefore, please see attached a version of the disputed information, with passages not subject to s24 and not including personal data, left unredacted.
James Warnock
Lawyer – MoJ, Public Law & SASO team, Justice and Development Division
Division A – Government Legal Department
102 Petty France, London, SW1H 9AJ, DX 152380 Westminster 8
Email: [email protected]
CC: Angelina Kennedy [email protected],
CC: “[email protected]” [email protected]
You can read the latest release as pdf which is largely assumed to be authored by Alex Passa, with snippets below:
UltraDNS serves many important domains and has experienced staff and mature procedures for coping with DoS attacks.
…Just one of the 12 Nominet DNS servers could handle around 250,000 queries per second: nearly 10 times the current query load for .uk as a whole.
…If this ever did happen, the UltraDNS infrastructure would easily be
latest release as pdf
able to handle all the .uk DNS traffic. A commitment to meet that load is part of
Nominet’s contract with UltraDNS.
- What % of Nominets current loss making can be attributed to price rises in its contract with UltraDNS?
- When was the UltraDNS contract last reviewed?
- Why has only one side of the conversation been provided?
- It is well known that Nominet uses DNSDIST and PowerDNS amongst others, and has contracts with Open-Xchange, why hide it?