Hi,
HRPC is a research group. It is exploring the issues in the UDRP (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) context of all Human Rights being linked and indivisible. The work needs to look into this confluence of rights and interests. This often requires messy discussions and brings out contrasting points of view. While the discussions do range rather widely and on occasion get a little stressed, as far as I can tell, they do lead to better understanding without rancor - though the outcome is unpredictable.
HRPC, as a research group, is by definition not about changing IETF decisions, but does perhaps try to understand them in the larger context. So we review the work done in the IETF, but have no expectation of directly affecting that work. We are certainly not in the position of overruling the IETF consensus on freedom of _expression_ and freedom from surveillance with the expressions which emanate from our freedom of _expression_.
HRPC is not an IETF WG that is on a direct path toward some specific engineering goal. The group is exploring, and occasionally annealing on, some points of consensus. Part of our exploration will look at the impact of decisions made in the IETF, but the results of those explorations are just food for thought and not in any way binding on anyone anywhere about anything. We cannot destroy a consensus.
It would be a pity to have this research group, which I thought was just beginning to find its stride and getting into the tough discussions, censored for its occasionable disagreeableness or touchy subjects. And while I am not quite sure how the IETF goes about closing an IRTF RG, I do hope no such thing happens as I beleive it would reflect quite badly on the IETF. One value I hope we can continue to strive for is the ability to discuss the difficult without becoming difficult.
Thanks
Avri
(Co-chair HRPC RG)
> 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
