I strongly agree, and would go further.
As I see it, the HRPC suffers fundamental problems from both
participation and its charter.
Thanks. I was going to write something like that but you said it better.
There are inherent tensions among different human rights. Free speech is
great, but it enables trolling, phishing, and swatting. Censorship is
bad, but most of us would prefer to censor phishes to our parents and
tweets of porn photos with our daughters' faces pasted in. The
traditional assertion is that the response to bad speech is more speech,
but that was from an era when printing presses were expensive, and there
weren't million-bot armies of screaming trolls. It is possible to think
productively about this tension, as Dave Clark did in his terrific plenary
talk at IETF 98, but unfortunately, he is an outlier.
I have spent over a decade arguing with people who imagine themselves to
be human rights advocates and are unwilling to consider the implications
of their narrow focus on speech and anonymity. (This month in the ICANN
WHOIS debate, a well known professor in Georgia is spluttering that every
security researcher who says that they use WHOIS data to shut down malware
and catch crooks is lying.) I am not interested in joining HRPC because,
like Eliot, I see no evidence of willingness to engagem with the real
range of human rights issues.
In the IETF, yesterday on the regext list, "Human Rights Review of
draft-ietf-regext-verificationcode" contains a long complaint that
security features could be used to discriminate against people. Well,
yes, that's what they're for.
https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/regext/current/msg01768.html
In anything like its current form HRPC is harmful to the IETF because it
gratuitously undermines our security efforts.
R's,
John
