Security expert, Alex Stamos, worked for Yahoo! and Facebook at managerial positions; he’s currently at Stanford as an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute.
Under the light of Michael Cohen’s testimony at the Congress, Mr. Stamos pointed out that the domain ShouldTrumpRun.com was under the control of a “Michael Cohen” with a NYC address in 2011. That information is extracted from historical WHOIS data via third party resources, such as DomainTools.
Changes in how WHOIS records are stored since May 2018 due to the European GDPR law, have complicated the important task of investigators, law enforcement and other researchers tracking crime.
Alex Stamos shared the WHOIS record of the domain ShouldTrumpRun.com from 2011, with the statements:
ShouldTrumpRun[dot]com was registered in October 2010 with a GoDaddy proxy whois. The first non-shielded record is a “michael cohen” in Trump Tower in November 2011.
Because historical whois data is a critical component of understanding online abuse ranging from small-time criminality to state-sponsored interference in elections.
The despicable GDPR is clearly enabling criminal activity via the loss of access to public data extracted from the WHOIS of domain names.
