(Speaking with no hats) On 27 Jul 2023, at 5:28, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
People and organisations have goals and agenda. Their proposals and opinions do not come out of the blue, they are rooted in their values, history, previous actions, etc. For organisations, the goals are often explicit (even if organisations also have goals that are a bit hidden) and are also expressed via their former declarations.
The above is all true. And when I know that a particular person or organization is pushing a particular proposal, that might give me reason to scrutinize particular parts of a proposal: If I know that an employee of a large DNS provider is pushing a proposal, I might look into it to see if it damages interoperability with small DNS providers. That's perfectly legitimate. However:
So, it is perfectly legitimate to judge a proposal by the person / organisation promoting it
No, it is absolutely not. It is one thing to take information about the person / organization to inform how you will scrutinize a proposal and another to come to conclusions about the proposal based on who is promoting it. In the above example, just because the large DNS provider is pushing the proposal is irrelevant to the question of whether it damages interoperability; that can only ever be judged independently, determining whether it actually does or doesn't. You are fine to say, "I think this proposal stinks because it makes the protocol impossible to implement by smaller DNS providers." But you are way off the rails if you say, "Big provider X is pushing this clearly for their own advantage, and on that basis it should be rejected." That's just a lazy evaluation with no technical merit. And you could be dead wrong on the outcome, because maybe it actually *disadvantages* them and they are proposing it because they think it helps the whole DNS ecosystem.
(like George Michaelson did in his assessment of IWF).
George also erred in his message. It would be perfectly reasonable to have said, "Dan's (or the IWF's) proposals water down encryption, mandate escrow and state actor insight into encrypted data, etc. ...and we have already evaluated such proposals and rejected them on legitimate technical grounds. Therefore, his claims to being unjustifiably ignored are not well-founded." Dan could then come back and say, "But my current proposals don't do those things" (at which point we'd ask him to show us what's different) or "But you missed this important technical ground" (he'd need a pretty impressive argument). But saying, "Child Protection advocacy almost always winds up seeking to water down the primacy of privacy preserving technology", as if that justifies dismissing any argument sight-unseen, is bogus.
(I, FWIW, disagree with Dan that since he "was not part of or aware of previous discussions (which is reason in itself to reassess the previous consensus), and also that the imminent adoption of online safety regulation in the UK and EU is a strong reason to revisit these discussions." But that's because Dan didn't show that his reasons for disagreeing with the previous consensus were not already considered, nor that the new regulations have any impact on the previous consensus. He mere absence is not "reason in itself", because as above, this is not about an individual or a government; it's about the technical argument given in the consensus and the technical arguments given by those who would revisit it. Accepting an argument based on who's giving it is no better than rejecting an argument on that basis.)
Also, it is simply necessary: there is no way a reasonable person could study everything from scratch, we don't have time for that. Deciding on previous knowledge is a normal way of working.
Scrutinizing particular points based on previous knowledge is fine. "Deciding" is certainly not. That's called prejudice.
pr -- Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/ All connections to the world are tenuous at best
