Re: Comments on <draft-cooper-privacy-policy-01.txt>

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

--On Wednesday, 14 July, 2010 05:39 -0700 Dave CROCKER
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> 
> 
> On 7/14/2010 2:10 AM, Randy Bush wrote:
>> as to the network, how many people and times need to tell you
>> that the ops team is unaware of anyone doing anything
>> untoward with people's packets or other data?

> How is that relevant?

If no one had suggested either that someone might be capturing
private data or tracking the contents of IETF network traffic
for either evil purposes or unauthorized/ undocumented research
on human subjects, we presumably wouldn't be having this
discussion, relevant or not.  

My recollection is that the short-lived password sniffing and
posting experiment was fairly well publicized in advance and
that people with weak systems were warned to either upgrade or
stay off the wireless network.  That constituted a fairly clear
"opt-out by doing something else" possibility (not very unlike
the upcoming network access authentication issues), not a secret
experiment. 

FWIW, my experience with the folks who have had long-term
involvement with IETF networks is that they are far more
sensitive to privacy and network integrity issues than the IETF
average as well as investing a huge amount of time which the
community often seems to not recognize and for which they are
not thanked nearly often enough.  The implication that they are
somehow involved in, or turning a blind eye to, nefarious
activities is very unfortunate.

    best,
      john