Re: [hrpc] HRPC recharter

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

Mallory,

Thanks for sending this revision. WRT to the specific revisions you
propose, I tend to think that the change to "policy" is a good one,
but ISTM that rechartering is an opportunity to take a deeper look at
what HRPC should do. The current charter seems to contemplate a sort
of mix of functions and I think it would be useful to ask which of
those are working well.

As an outsider, when HRPC was first started, it seemed to have a real
BCP-72ish vibe in which there would be:

- Some common set of expectations for a what it would mean for a
  document to be analyzed from a human rights perspective (presumably
  documented in RFC 8280)

- Some process for external review for those factors (presumably done
  by HRPC)

So, for instance, the current charter has this bullet:

  * To propose guidelines to protect the Internet as a
    human-rights-enabling environment in future protocol development,
    in a manner similar to the work done for Privacy Considerations in
    RFC 6973.

And of course there is the the "Considerations" name of the RG
itself.

Whatever the intentions at the time, I think it's pretty clear that
this has not been the outcome: there haven't been that many of these
reviews and I don't think there's really broad consensus on how to
think about human rights in protocol design (see my separate review of
the 8280 revision [0]). More generally, at least from my perspective,
the work of HRPC has not had much impact on IETF operational practice
in terms of protocol design (even less so than there is around Privacy
Considerations).

I see that the proposed charter revises this bullet somewhat to remove
the comparison to 6973, but I think it would be good to be clearer in
the charter that the intent for the HRPC is not to be some
human-rights flavored version of secdir or opsdir. In particular, if
guidelines for how to design protocols so that they protect human
rights are to have any normative force, they need to come out of the
IETF, not the IRTF. And if the intent is to provide something
informative, then I think what's needed is something much more like an
analysis of problems and a catalog of techniques than guidelines. This
is, for instance, what PEARG does.


The two other objectives have a more public awareness type flavor:

 * To expose the relations between protocols and values, with a focus
   on the human rights framework.
 * To increase the awareness in both the policy community and the
   technical community on the importance of the technical workings of
   the Internet and its impact on human rights and the public
   interest.

I don't track the work in these areas as closely, so I'm less able
to say whether that work is going well or not. For what it's worth,
I don't typically refer to the artifacts of this group as the main
sources for the human rights impacts of protocols, but perhaps
others have a different experience.

In any case, I think rather than just spinning a new charter, it
would be helpful to take a bigger picture look at what this RG
should be trying to accomplish.

-Ekr


[0] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/hrpc/I2mP4Wehcj3UTSGqh4uwH6QoA4Y/

On Thu, Dec 22, 2022 at 9:30 AM Mallory Knodel <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Dear RG,
>
> Hope everyone is well.
>
> At the 115 meeting HRPC was reviewed by the IAB [0], notes of which are
> forthcoming from the IAB.
>
> Partially as a result, though this activity predates the review itself,
> Sofia and I have been reviewing the HRPC charter. In particular we are
> keen to expand HRPC slightly, though arguably our area of work will
> remain the same (more on that later), to explicitly welcome policy
> discussions.
>
> The recharter text is available in GitHub [1] where you can view a diff
> [2]. It is also in a plaintext format with more visual indications of
> where the changes have been made [3].
>
> My view on the proposed change to include "policy" as a replacement for
> "protocol" in the name and charter text have been shaped by both of the
> past chairs of HRPC and Colin's feedback, which is that the human rights
> framework can apply to virtually any policy discussion and therefore
> HRPC has all along according to its charter had a mandate to talk about
> these issues. However I do think that the slight rephrasing in places
> gives us necessary updates that reflect the current political moment as
> well as learning from past lessons since the group was chartered the
> first time. Additionally I think there is value in the group name and
> its charter text being written so as to explicitly attract researchers
> and research that discuss policy, as a "place to land" in the IETF/IRTF.
>
> We welcome any comments on the proposed changes.
>
> Happy new year and best wishes to everyone,
>
> -Chairs, Mallory & Sofia
>
> [0] https://www.iab.org/wiki/index.php/RG_Reviews
>
> [1] https://github.com/IRTF-HRPC/IRTF-HRPC/blob/main/hrpccharter.md
>
> [2]
>
> https://github.com/IRTF-HRPC/IRTF-HRPC/commit/1a029b31ab3521e8da1490924c94397a99497d19
>
> [3] https://pad.riseup.net/p/Qgq2TJuWLbFSY1Jrcxgm
>
>
> --
> Mallory Knodel
> CTO, Center for Democracy and Technology
> gpg fingerprint :: E3EB 63E0 65A3 B240 BCD9 B071 0C32 A271 BD3C C780
>
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