On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 7:05 PM, Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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Website: http://hallambaker.com/
>Of course :-) We meant that the loss of privacy causes concern, not the revelations.
> This wording is surprising. It looks like it is the revelations that
> undermined confidence, and not the NSA actions. I would prefer
> something like, to avoid shooting the messenger:
No, it is the revelations that cause concern.
Nobody is in the least concerned about the fact that the British government and royal family has been replaced by a group of reptilian dopplegangers apart from David Ike who is the only person who knows about it.
It is the actions that justify the concern but without the revelations there is no concern.
The problem with the language used as I see it is that it is unfortunately rather close to the language used by the establishment types who run round telling us all not to worry our heads about what they are doing and we must certainly not ever question their motives or intentions.
The reason I keep reminding people about the previous uses of the syncretic power of GCHQ and the NSA is that they prove that we do need to keep questioning their motives. For years people were dismissed as paranoid leftist hippies for suggesting that the CIA installed a dictatorship in Greece. And now it is known that exactly that happened.
In the same way, the idea that US government might attempt to use control over ICANN or IANA for leverage has to be taken seriously. The question is not whether Steve Crocker is comfortable with the situation, it is whether the governance infrastructure is strong enough to prevent abuse over centuries.
The US government is currently shut down because some folk in Congress are trying to use the threat of a recession to deny access to health care to a fifth of the population. It is certainly not inconceivable that a future Congress would attempt to abuse control over ICANN is nonsense. It is a US registered corporation subject to US law.
If nothing is done then sooner or later there will be some idiot on his hind legs in the Senate talking for 21 hours demanding that Cuba or Palestine be dropped out of the DNS root or be denied IPv6 allocations or some equally stupid grandstanding demand designed to give him a platform on which to run for higher office.
I think the US executive branch would be better rid of the control before the vandals work out how to use it for mischief. But better would be to ensure that no such leverage exists. There is no reason for the apex of the DNS to be a single root, it could be signed by a quorum of signers (in addition to the key splitting which I am fully familiar with). And every government should be assigned a sovereign reserve of IPv6 addresses to prevent a scarcity being used as leverage.
Website: http://hallambaker.com/