Re: [hrpc] HRPC recharter

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Apr 17, 2023 at 5:15 AM Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> On 14-04-2023 19:51, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> > Dear colleagues,
> >
> > Previous disclaimer still in effect.
> >
> > On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 12:05:01PM +0200, Jens Finkhaeuser wrote:
> >
> >> Since the topic is on the intersection between human rights and
> protocol design, it is clear enough as well that the purpose is to provide
> a bridge between two otherwise distinct worlds that influence each other.
> That implies that there are two kinds of output to be expected from the
> group: one detailing human rights impacts to protocol designers. And the
> other detailing protocol design impacts to human rights folk.
> >>
> >
> > That was indeed part of the hope, at least as I understood it, when the
> RG was chartered.  I am not too convinced that hope has been realized, and
> it appears in particular that an awful lot of people with real protocol
> engineering experience aren't participating too heavily.
>
> Interesting - the IAB seems to think differently about this:
>
>
> https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2023/03/IAB-Response-to-OHCHR-consultation.pdf


Which part of this text do you think contradicts what Andrew said? I see
only
the following paragraph, which strikes me as pretty boilerplate:

In 2015, the IRTF chartered a research group on Human Rights Protocol
Considerations (HRPC) and thereby promotes the interconnection of human
rights
research and Internet protocol standardization. HRPC research aims to
expose the
relation between protocols and human rights, with a focus on the rights to
freedom
of expression and freedom of assembly. It has proposed guidelines to
protect the
Internet as a human-rights-enabling environment in future protocol
development
with its first publication, that has led to the increase of awareness, in
both the human
rights community and the technical community, of the importance of the
technical
workings of the Internet and its impact on human rights (RFC 8280)


and so do the people that have actually tested the guidelines.
>

It's probably useful to distinguish between the people in this RG who have
"tested" the guidelines by trying to apply them to WGs and the experience
of the people in various WGs where the guidelines have been applied.
As I noted earlier, I think this experience has been rather more mixed,
and in particular, I don't think the application to QUIC was very useful.

-Ekr





> > My own experience at attempting to get some language that I felt better
> comported with the experience of designing protocols was discouraging
> enough that I'd mostly given up; then I got my current job and I thought it
> was totally inappropriate for me to propose anything but the most trivial
> suggestions.  Others might have had a different experience, but a quick
> survey of the mailing list archives doesn't leave me too hopeful.
>
> Would be very welcome if you could substantiate your claims, including the
> ones you made in your previous emails.
>
> >
> >> Rhetoric on RFCs aside, there is no requirement for protocol designers
> to adhere to the documents aimed at them.
> >>
> >
> > But if policy-makers are having this forum advertised to them as a way
> to influence "the IETF" or a way to inject policy considerations into IETF
> procedures, that _is_ an issue
>
> This, again, seems to be unsupported claim that is not based in concrete
> text or data. It would be great that if people speculate they indicate they
> do so, it is a research group after all.
>
> > (and is also politics by other means, I suppose, since that's been such
> a theme).
>
> I don't think any part of any discussion has been to inject politics, but
> trace them and map different positions on it [0].
>
>
> Best,
>
> Niels
>
> [0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-tenoever-hrpc-political-01
>
> >
> >> As for the second class of documents, the main use case is of course to
> influence policy in such a way that there is ideally no conflict between
> the two separate concerns. I'm not sure I'd characterize this as partial
> policy development, however. It's better categorized as expert advice,
> which policy makers would otherwise each have to solicit independently,
> probably with less consensus. Again, however, policy makers are under no
> obligation to consider these outputs.
> >>
> >
> > I'd be interested in any examples you have of such advice that came from
> this RG.  In my actual job, of course, we provide such advice to
> policy-makers all the time, but we generally don't use RFCs to do so.
> Frankly, even the format of RFCs is sufficiently strange as to be fairly
> useless for such persuasion.  And the "rough consensus of the RG" rule is
> kind of impossible to explain (it's possible, though not easy, for
> protocols.  But nobody I've tried to talk to about it has any understanding
> of what it means for a RG to have consensus on a research output.  This
> might be my fault, since _I_ don't understand it so have a hard time giving
> an account).
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > A
> >
>
> --
> Niels ten Oever, PhD
> Co-Principal Investigator - critical infrastructure lab - University of
> Amsterdam
> Assistant Professor - Department of European Studies - University of
> Amsterdam
>
> W: https://criticalinfralab.net
> W: https://nielstenoever.net
> PGP: 4254 ECD5 D4CF F6AF 8B91 0D9F EFAD 2E49 CC90 C10C
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