Re: [Gendispatch] Updated draft: Policy experts are IETF stakeholders

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

> Il 20/06/2023 19:33 EEST John Levine <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
> While policy advice on technical documents can certainly be helpful,
> it is simply not possible to provide useful policy advice without a
> clear understanding of the technology. That's how you end up with
> cryptographers repeatedly explaining why we can't put back doors in
> cryptosystems and policy people telling us we have to, just nerd
> harder.

Don't misunderstand me, I do think that backdoors in crypto are a bad idea, but: is the cryptographers' explanation of why we can't have them a technical or a policy argument? I always understood it as "if we do, there is no way to eliminate the risk that they will fall into the wrong hands", but whether that risk is acceptable or not and under which conditions is a policy decision, not a technical one.

I'm bringing this up to show the general point: the policy community often perceives IETF participants as engineers that think they should unilaterally set the policies for everyone just because of their technical knowledge and because they can (since they control implementations), and this is the root of the complaints by a wide range of other stakeholders.

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[e-mail] 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy