Re: [saag] [Pearg] Ten years after Snowden (2013 - 2023), is IETF keeping its promises?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

Umm, you miss out the fact that much of that style of thinking came out of
groups like The Work and Ithiel de Sola Pool's colleagues at MIT:
Technologies of Freedom, transformational technologies, etc. etc.

On the face of it, the thinking behind the Internet is no less absurd than
promoting conceptual art in the 1950s as a bulwark against Socialist
Realism. But they did it because conceptual art makes people think and
there is a rather popular art museum in NYC named for a CIA agent as a
consequence.

Neither the US establishment in general nor the security establishment was
ever as unified behind what is generally imagined to be the establishment
view that cryptography is bad, etc. etc. Rather more interestingly perhaps,
the parts of the security establishment that was most aggressively opposed
to communism, being committed to defeating it, was supportive of technology
and cryptography while it was the faction that preferred coexistence with
communism that attempted control.


On Mon, Jan 9, 2023 at 3:36 PM Tony Rutkowski <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Phil.  You have captured the essence of the IETF.  It is their home - and
> how most of the world views that collective.  And at some level it has
> value to different people and institutions, especially the participants.
>
> What has been forever amazing over the past 25 years, however, is how a
> virtual internet concept devised by Louis Pouzin and imbued with lots of
> funding for tinkering by DARPA and then NSF, became the foundation for a
> religious cult that views themselves as the all-powerful guardians of some
> self-implementing specifications that are the salvation of humankind.  You
> have to admit, that is freaky.
>
> Enough said....
>
> --tony r
>
>
> On 1/9/2023 12:27 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>
> You miss out people like myself: Technologists with a personal agenda and
> independent means to pursue it. The Internet has always been shaped by
> hacktivism.
>
>