Re: [73attendees] Is USA qualified for2.3ofdraft-palet-ietf-meeting-venue-selection-criteria?

[Fred Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Nov 18, 2008, at 2:27 PM, Soininen Jonne (NSN FI/Espoo) wrote:

> I think it would be good for people that were trying to come to the  
> IETF and couldn't to tell the IAD or me what happened. Accurate data  
> is very important.

I spoke with colleagues at Tsinghua last night. Apparently some 30  
people that had intended to come from China were unable to for visa  
reasons. The issue is basically the US Embassy; they have historically  
gone out of their way in what appears to be a concerted effort to make  
Chinese travel to the US difficult. Last year I brought a post-doc  
from Xian to give a talk, and the embassy process took a couple of  
months including rewriting the letter of support to include a specific  
sequence of words that appeared to be important to someone.

That of course goes both ways; going to China is never trivial for me,  
and last summer it was a real issue. And we could discuss Russia; last  
year when I spoke on a panel chaired by the head of Department K of  
the Interior Ministry (Cybercrime), the FSB decided they additionally  
needed to review the application, and told me that they would reach a  
decision on the day I was scheduled to speak at RANS. If we discount  
US locations, we may also be forced to discount those.
_______________________________________________
73attendees mailing list
[e-mail]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/73attendees