Re: Proposed IETF Anti-Harassment Policy

[Theodore Ts'o <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 10:11:40AM +0100, Abdussalam Baryun wrote:
> >    Harassment is unwelcome hostile or intimidating behavior, in
> >    particular speech and behavior that is sexually aggressive or
> >    intimidates based on attributes like race, gender, religion, age,
> >    color, national origin, ancestry, disability, sexual orientation,
> >    or gender identity.
>
> How does this policy help if there is no identity known by the one who
> abuses other identified people? Usually harrassment will come from people
> that hide their identity, gender, religion, race, etc, because they don't
> want policies to affect their behavior/future, or most important
> their real-work or real-title or real-reputation in the IETF or in its WGs
> (the system policy attacker likes to have more faces/addresses instead of
> more hats/authorities).

So, my understanding of the harassment policy is that a statement such
as "Certifying Authorities can't be trusted to be competent at
validating the entity requesting a certificate is really authorized to
speak for Certificate Subject" would not be harassment because
Certifying Authorities is not a protected class.

On the other hand, a statement such as, "I don't believe you because
you are heterosexual", or "We can't trust Joe because he is a
Pastafarian", etc., would be arrassment, because they are based on the
proctected classes listed above.

Note that in both of these examples, it does not matter what identity
class(es) the sender happens to fall into, whether he/she/it is Male,
a Pastafarian, Tibetian, wheelchair-bound, etc.

I agree with the suggestion that giving some examples of things which
would be clearly considered by an ombudsperson and those that would
not would be very useful.

					- Ted