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

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Dear IAOC members,

I asked what I thought were some fairly reasonable questions on the legalities of running a meeting as normal IETF meeting in PRC - I carefully stayed away from social policy issues about if this was a good place to have a meeting or not.

I was wondering if you plan to answer any of these or not? If you don't plan to answer them, I'd rather know that then just have to assume it. If you do plan but on answers any of them, I'd love to find out any answers you currently know and also find out which question you plan not to answer, and to find out the timelines of when you might have an answer for questions you can't currently answer. I don't have any problem with you telling me some of these questions are TSTA (too stupid to answer).

Thanks, Cullen


On Sep 23, 2009, at 9:45 PM, Cullen Jennings wrote:


IAOC,

I'm trying to understand what is political speech in China. The Geopriv WG deals with protecting users' location privacy. The policies of more than one country have come up in geopriv meetings in very derogatory terms. There have been very derogatory comments made by people about the US's wiretap policy. Unless someone can point me at specifics of what is or is not OK, I would find this very concerning. We also regularly discuss issues around Taiwan/ China, cryptography, wiretap, DNS root server location, reverse engineering, and so on. Clearly most the people involved with IETF would never want to break the laws of the country they are visiting but the question is do we actually understand the laws and what impact do they have on our technical work? To help us make informed decision about whether these terms are issues or not:

1) What is political speech in China? And can we explain that to IETF participants well enough that they know what is OK and what is not.

2) Are there any special rules about publishing and broadcasting? I note that the IETF, unlike most other groups having meetings, broadcasts the meetings live over the internet, which will be both publishing the material and exporting it outside of the PRC.

3) Are there any rules around discussion, publication, or export of of cryptography algorithms and technology? publishing weaknesses of national crypto algorithms?

4) Many of our participants use communications products (like jabber clients) that they helped develop and include strong cryptography. Do they need permission to use these in China?

5) When discussing what I think of as technical issues, many participants regularly treat Taiwan and PRC as two different countries and currently recognize both of them as separate countries in their own right. I'd actually venture a guess that there is strong IETF consensus they should be treated this way. Could any discussions like this be viewed as political speech? What are the rules on this?

6) It is not core to IETF work but some of us do some interop of running code for IETF protocols under development sometimes at IETF. This would be about the right timing for running P2PSIP code, but that requires us to to run a local CA. Is any special permission needed to run a CA in China?

7) Would we be OK running a BOF on techniques for firewall advancement in general and in particular on getting around any firewalls China runs? [Seriously, you know someone will propose this BOF, the questions is could we run it or not?]

8) Given the Chairs for WG set the agendas and such, I am assuming that a reasonable person would consider all the presentation done by presenters at the front of the room to be things that are under control of the client. Is this the assumption the IAOC is working under too?

9) What is the IETF's potential liability here. If the meeting was canceled on Monday, everyone checked out of hotels early and paid a one day change fee, would the IETF be responsible for the hotel's loss of revenue for the Wednesday through Friday nights?

10) If the meeting is canceled, will the IETF be reimbursing the registration fees?

11) Given the IETF would be depending on the actions of the participants of the meeting to meet the contract, it would seem very prudent to me to make sure that each participant agreed to this. Will you be asking each participant to sign an agreement agreeing to these terms?

12) Do you all feel like you need a beer yet?

I'm trying to get to the bottom about what is legal and what is not in the PRC. Ignorance is not an excuse for the law in any country and when I don't know if something is legal or not, I don't do it. Right now I am looking for input from knowledgeable people on these questions. I imagine the IAOC has looked into many of these and would appreciate understanding what you have found.

Thanks, Cullen


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