Re: Clarifying Russ's hums

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

--On Thursday, 07 November, 2013 10:47 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> It seems to me that all three are perfecly clear as
> aspirational goals, and that they all include some room for
> interpretation. It's also true that some of them may be in
> immediate conflict with other goals (for example, a web proxy
> that is blind to the content might be rather bad at content
> filtering). But all that will come out in the detailed
> analysis of each issue. Guiding principles really have to
> skate over many details.

Brian,

I thought of it less as (even) aspirational goals than as
theater and, as such, completely appropriate.  As anything
closer to a consensus evaluation, it seemed to have many of the
properties that draft-resnick-on-consensus warns about: hums at
the end of the process that were not clearly motivated except as
a way of confirming and announcing consensus, assessment and
reporting of loudness as if it were a vote, concentrating on the
majority response rather than the issues and reasoning of the
minority, and asking sweeping questions that don't seem to lead
to anything actionable (I assume that a hum associated with the
question "who is in favor of breathing" would yield at least
equal results. at least unless everyone who didn't hum was then
asked to demonstrate their objections by ceasing to do it).

I also assume that, from a policy standpoint, if an IESG decided
to reject every specification, especially those that update
existing protocols because the result isn't optimal from a
security point of view, we've rapidly see either our first
recalls or some rather dramatic reforms.

I think that, after this morning's discussion, what I'd like to
see is the same thing I would have liked to see yesterday, which
is that every specification be evaluated in terms of the
tradeoffs among all of the considerations that bear on it,
including security generally and surveillance-resistance
specifically.  If the plenary discussion and/or the theatrical
qualities of the hums  leads us to get more serious and
effective about that, it would be, IMO, great.

If not, that would be unfortunate, but I hope today's plenary
was intended to start and frame a discussion that will continue,
not end it.

best,
   john