A United Nations agency is drawing up technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, which will allow IP tracing. If the standard, which is also being backed by the U.S. National Security Agency, goes ahead, then the Internet will no longer be anonymous.

The "IP Traceback" drafting group, named Q6/17, is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. The secret meeting will be closed to the press. Marc Rotenberg, Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., said that it doesn't appear that there's been any real consideration of how this type of capability could be misused.  He said it was a major human rights concern.

CNET journalists have found a document submitted by China this spring. This talks about the creation of an IP traceback mechanism and is required to be adapted to various network environments, such as IPv4 and IPv6, wire and wireless and ADSL, cable, Ethernet.

Generally, the fear is that the standard will be used by governments to suppress opposition, which is against the UN's own Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

More here.