On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 5:14 PM, Emily Shepherd <emily@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 04:34:20PM -0500, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
No, I don't think this is a meeting venue issue. It is a policy issue and
thus a question for the whole IETF.
The IETF is the Internet Engineering Task Force. This is not an Internet Engineering issue and thus not appropriate discussion for the IETF.
To make such a statement is to overlook the fact that the development of communications technology is inevitably a political activity.
During the cold war, the countries in Europe developed five different television standards. This was not, as is often claimed merely due to the desire to introduce non tariff trade barriers, and would in any case have been pointless if so.
The primary design constraint on the design of the West German colour TV system was to enable viewers in East Germany to watch. And the placement of every TV antenna in West Germany was designed to achieve maximal reach into East Germany. I know because I worked with the people who did the designs.
In the early 1990s, there were a dozen network hypertext systems emerging, at least four of which were considerably better resourced than the Web. The Web was not even the largest such system when whitehouse.gov went online. The White House adopted the Web in part due to the fact that they had clear title to the NCSA code and the CERN code was public domain. But the reason the server was deployed was as part of what Carville called the 'disintermediation' strategy, a term that originated with the same MIT nexus that had such firm opinions on the placement of TV antennas.
No matter how any of us may feel about any US policy it would be wildly inappropriate to confuse the IETF's mission with such discussions. If you want to object to them, that is fine but it should be done outside of the IETF. In fact, every single IETF contributor could protest, or indeed support, any political policy in unison if they wanted, as long as they don't do it in the IETF's name.
Take a look at the IETF mission statement and you will find that it is entirely circular in form. The IETF built the Internet and the Internet is what the IETF builds.
The reason that the meeting venue list isn't the appropriate venue is that we may well get into the part of the story where it is no longer possible to do business the old way.
Jari is correct in saying we need to build tools that protect against mass surveillance. But that isn't all we need. There is now abundant evidence that the communications infrastructures that support democratic political parties in the US, Germany and France have been attacked by hostile nation state actors and it is now clear that every country is under attack.
Forget whether it was Russia or whoever last time. From now on it is going to be open season.
If we are going to defend the system we need a communication infrastructure where strong end to end cryptographic security is default and has no impact on the user.