On 9/3/19 9:31 AM, Eric Rescorla wrote:
On Mon, Sep 2, 2019 at 6:52 PM Alissa Cooper <
alissa@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
But all of this work
will take time. In the interim, we will all continue to
feel our way through in an extremely gray area where what
seems like an obvious right answer to one person seems
like an obvious wrong answer to another. During this
interim period, a personal wish of mine would be to not
have every message sent by the SAA challenged and
adjudicated on
ietf@xxxxxxxx.
I wanted to pull out and amplify this point.
We have a system which incorporates a lot of points of
escalation for bad decisions (appeals, the main ietf list,
plenaries, recalls), and many of those mechanisms have low
thresholds for activation. If every action by leadership
(and for the sake of this discussion I'm including the SAA
in leadership) is escalated, the system will quickly grind
to a halt. What keeps it running even as smoothly as it does
is that people mostly adhere to the norm of escalating only
when really necessary.
All true. But the SAA is a fairly unique threat. They're not
only empowered to shut people down, they also operate without
transparency or real accountability. When the SAA is found to
have grossly exceeded their authority under 3005 (which does
appear to have been the case), and the IETF leadership doesn't
immediately address this problem, it undermines trust in the
organization and the leadership.
And all of this is taking place in the broader context of an
effort, apparently endorsed by some of the leadership, to promote
censorship of IETF input for arbitrary reasons.
To say this is chilling is a tremendous understatement.
I am looking for some sign that leadership takes these problems
seriously and will rectify them. So far what I see looks like
efforts to sweep them under a rug.
Keith
