Re: Recent threads concerning sergeants-at-arms

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 9/3/19 9:31 AM, Eric Rescorla wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 2, 2019 at 6:52 PM Alissa Cooper <[e-mail] 
> <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>
>     But all of this work will take time. In the interim, we will all
>     continue to feel our way through in an extremely gray area where
>     what seems like an obvious right answer to one person seems like
>     an obvious wrong answer to another. During this interim period, a
>     personal wish of mine would be to not have every message sent by
>     the SAA challenged and adjudicated on [e-mail]
>     <mailto:[e-mail]>.
>
>
> I wanted to pull out and amplify this point.
>
> We have a system which incorporates a lot of points of escalation for 
> bad decisions (appeals, the main ietf list, plenaries, recalls), and 
> many of those mechanisms have low thresholds for activation. If every 
> action by leadership (and for the sake of this discussion I'm 
> including the SAA in leadership) is escalated, the system will quickly 
> grind to a halt. What keeps it running even as smoothly as it does is 
> that people mostly adhere to the norm of escalating only when really 
> necessary.

All true.  But the SAA is a fairly unique threat.   They're not only 
empowered to shut people down, they also operate without transparency or 
real accountability.  When the SAA is found to have grossly exceeded 
their authority under 3005 (which does appear to have been the case), 
and the IETF leadership doesn't immediately address this problem, it 
undermines trust in the organization and the leadership.

And all of this is taking place in the broader context of an effort, 
apparently endorsed by some of the leadership, to promote censorship of 
IETF input for arbitrary reasons.

To say this is chilling is a tremendous understatement.

I am looking for some sign that leadership takes these problems 
seriously and will rectify them.   So far what I see looks like efforts 
to sweep them under a rug.

Keith