Re: Sergeant at arms: please deal with [e-mail]

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

Strangely enough, I concur too.

If you look at my original complaint to Jordi, anonymity was not mentioned.
I only raised it when asked  why I requested action. And I agree: anonymity
in itself is not a problem.

Anonymity + irrelevance is a problem, in my opinion.

Regards
   Brian

On 23/10/2013 07:50, John C Klensin wrote:
> Although I usually object to doing this, +1.  Well stated and I
> strongly concur.
> 
>     john
> 
> 
> --On Tuesday, October 22, 2013 10:41 -0800 Melinda Shore
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> The more I've been thinking about this the less comfortable
>> I am with how this was executed.  I have no disagreement
>> whatsoever with removing this person's posting privileges.
>> But, I have a huge problem with Jordi's statement:
>>
>>   "As Sergeant-at-arms, I agree with other previous
>>   postings and believe that anonymous posting is not
>>   tolerable in the IETF mail exploders."
>>
>> Clearly, there are non-trivial problems around making decisions
>> on the basis of something sort of like identity in
>> unauthenticated email.  We don't *really* know who other
>> people are - we tend to assume that they are who they say they
>> are and evaluate their credibility (or not) on things like
>> content, reputation, past performance, etc.  The problem with
>> [e-mail] isn't that he (and since we're
>> pretty sure we know who this is, we'll stick with masculine
>> pronouns) has an email address that doesn't look like a name
>> (although his name could have been Mars Techno Cat, as
>> unlikely as that is).  The problem is that he had no prior
>> history of posting -as that name- and posted nothing but
>> off-topic rants and personal attacks. I would hope that the
>> attacks would be sufficient to have his posting privileges
>> revoked and that having an unfamiliar email address would not
>> be sufficient.
>>
>> Additionally, let me suggest that finding anonymous posts
>> "not tolerable" is inconsistent with the perpass discussions
>> and concerns expressed *here* about privacy.
>> We want accountability in our documents and that means knowing
>> that the people who contribute to our work 1) have technical
>> substance, and 2) are having their comments and text evaluated
>> by other people of technical substance.  It does not
>> necessarily mean knowing their names or identities.  In many
>> discussions about privacy and about whether or not various
>> cryptographic technologies have been deliberately weakened by
>> some US government agency, there have been repeated assertion
>> that open processes and aggressive review provide protection
>> against that sort of problem.  That ought to apply here, as
>> well.
>>
>> Anonymity is not a problem.  Behaving badly is a problem.
>> I really never want to see someone's ejection justified on
>> the basis of their putative "anonymity" again.  I am not
>> arguing that [e-mail] ought to be allowed
>> anywhere near an IETF mailing list but that the reason that
>> was given for throwing him off was not correct.  We should
>> be working to protect anonymity and privacy, not punishing it.
>>
>> Melinda
> 
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