Re: Request for community guidance on issue concerning a future meeting of the IETF

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I have been in a couple of meetings in China, and everything always went smoothly. Arrival process at the airport is one of the moat pleasant that I've had outside Schengen area in EU. There is a lot of university and commercial activity on new Internet technology, and going there gives one typically a very different, fresh viewpoint. I never had any problems with my VPN and had also direct access to the sites that I use daily. Its a large country with very large variations in the level of modernization and infrastructure, e.g., hotel, restaurant and Internet connection quality can vary quite a bit. Some of my colleagues in the same lab have also been over there, e.g., the 3GPP security group has met there several times (and they often deal with topics such as encryption or anonymity) and the experience was similar.

With regards to the hotel clause I need to say that I'm not an expert in writing hotel contracts. But I'll just that there are plenty of laws that one has to obey in every country. Unfortunately, there may not always be an bulletproof way to avoid getting into problems with purposefully vague laws. If the authorities really wanted to, I'm sure a sizable fraction of the IETF could be investigated in many countries for, say, export of encryption software or just being a crypto expert (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Sklyarov), reverse-engineering which might be a violation of DCMA (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography#Digital_rights_management), copyright violations for your personal benefit, building software or protocols that allow others to violate someone's copyright (we have several working groups trying to improve P2P technology), or linking to infringing content*. But for some reason none of us are suddenly scared about these things. That's because we know from experience that when we go to a country, we are not suddenly all arrested. I would suggest the way to resolve our current question is to look for other meetings that have taken place in China. If operator forums, 3GPP, IEEE, a few major scientific conferences on our field, etc have successfully met there, I think we should go as well.

I also strongly believe that political views should not matter for this discussion. For the record, I'm not happy with the actions of the Chinese government. But I'm also unhappy with many other governments, including the one in my own country. If we start blaming a particular country, there's a lot of blame to go around.

Jari

*) Message to whoever intercepts this e-mail: Naturally, I have not been involved with any of the listed activities :-)

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