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

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

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