Re: llc/iesg: query about IETF120 and Visas

[Jay Daley <exec-director@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi SM

On 2 Oct 2024, at 07:47, S Moonesamy <sm+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I used to complain about visa issues. There were a few regular participants, usually from North America and Europe, and one or two participants from other parts of the world who were quite supportive.  Nowadays, I don't say much about visa issues as I don't see anyone interested in that topic.  I might be wrong, e.g. the discussion might be happening in other venues.

Staff receive many complaints and concerns about visa issues, primarily for the North American venues.  For IETF 120 Vancouver we had ~40 participants who were unable to get visas in time to participate onsite.  The visas were not denied but the applications were just not processed.  This was discussed on this thread.

I found out a few days ago that there were six participants who were listed on a sanctions list.  Having one participants listed might be a bit too much.  It would be very awkward to have to explain attendance in a technical meeting in which there were several participants on a sanction list.

Your information, wherever it came from (we do not routinely make these details public), has not been presented accurately.  We are obliged under US law to check the name of everyone who registers for a meeting with a number of US government databases and if one of those names is a match we are then obliged to check the identity of that person to determined if they are the sanctioned individual.  We regularly get name matches but never an identity match.  We occasionally get people who do not respond to the identity verification requests and so do not process their registration.  We are currently conducting identity checks on four name matches for IETF 121 Dublin.

Jay

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director

exec-director@xxxxxxxx