--On Saturday, December 07, 2013 10:01 +1300 Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > ...this is a social, economic and political issue outside the > IETF's scope. Our ethical obligation as engineers is clear to > me: make the Internet as secure as possible, from all security > points of view including privacy. Actually the recent > revelations don't change a thing except that they have brought > a well understood attack model into public view and underlined > that we need to defend against it. My observation is that no technological policy applied with complete uniformity is ever the ideal solution. In this case, "making the Internet as secure as possible" sounds good until one considers the implication of allowing complete privacy for all possible criminal activities. I would say that our ethical obligation as engineers is not to decide what technological policy is best for society, but rather to inform and educate the public (in all its facets) as well as possible about the realities and the possibilities of the technology, so that the larger society can decide how to handle the unavoidable tradeoffs between various benefits and costs. Dale