John and others, My apologies for not being able to follow this thread during the week. Two observations from someone with some claim to a social science background: * If a researcher starts to examine almost any standards body, engineering design group, or scientific collaboration or study with the assumption that people without the requisite educational or experiential background should be able to walk in the virtual door and fully participate as peers with those who have such a background, bad results are almost certain to follow. If that starting assumption is strong enough, those bad results will often include the conclusion that the body being examined is being exclusionary or elitist. Much the same problem occurs when someone comes to a meeting conducted in a language they don't understand and where the subject matter of the meeting is sufficiently specialized that conventional translation and translators don't work well even if they are available. At least in some countries, jokes and comments about whether some topic or task is about rocket science, or requires the skills of rockets scientists often stem from the same problem. This type of research, carried out on that style, may also be a faint echo of the times when European and US-based anthropologists did work in indigenous societies in various parts of the world with the assumptions of inherent superiority of European cultures and backwardness of those indigenous ones. That analogy, IMO, should not be pushed too hard but, as I said, echoes. Of course, none of that proves that participants in the standards (or other body) are not being exclusionary or that they have the right to treat the researcher badly. We need to understand that the problem is complicated and the researcher(s) need to understand that, if we spent as much time and energy as needed to bring them up to speed on the conversations to the point that they can understand them and participate usefully, it is likely that no actual work work get done. When those understandings do not exist (or are resisted) what follows, no matter how presented, often ends up much closer to polemics and name-calling than meaningful research. * As John Levine more or less pointed out below, getting encryption right means finding mutual understandings and understanding what will inevitably be a somewhat delicate balance. While, like him, I see the advantages of encryption as greater than the disadvantages, it seems to me that it is very much in our interests --and very much in the interest of preserving access to encryption-- if we recognize that there are tradeoffs and help people understand them, we are all likely to be better off in the long term than if we work ourselves into "encryption good; anyone who questions that is inherently evil or stupid" positions like a sister organization of ours seems to be doing. best, john --On Wednesday, 26 July, 2023 16:45 -0700 John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I know people who work on CSAM and while they are uniformly > working hard to fight it, they do tend to a degree of tunnel > vision and unfortunate assumptions that anyone who makes it > harder for them to do their jobs is ignorant or malicious. And > then there's the "nerd harder and give us a back door only > good people can use" stuff. > > But that can cut both ways. There is absolutely a lot of bad > stuff that is passed through encrypted channels, and shrugging > and saying too bad, can't do anything is not going to make us > any friends. I agree that on balance the benefits of > encryption outweigh the costs, but the costs are real.
