Re: why exactly is HRPC for, was Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

["John Levine" <[e-mail]>]

In article <32d96826-38ff-4b40-a6c5-f979ac9dbfda@avris-iPad> you write:
>It would be a pity to have this research group, which I thought was just beginning to find its stride and getting into the tough
>discussions, censored for its occasionable disagreeableness or touchy subjects. 

Thanks for your note, but if you reread the message you're responding
to, you'll see that you've gotten the problem exactly backwards.
The issue isn't that HRPC gets into tough discussions or touchy
subjects.  It's that it doesn't.  It has consistently looked only at a
narrow subset of rights issues, and completely ignored the rest of
them.  This myopic focus leads to results that I would say are at best
unfortunate.

Also, even though the HRPC is indeed an RG and not a WG, this
discussion started with a pretty clear request that the IETF change
the way it does business.  We have processes for that.  For starters,
where's the I-D about what the problem is and what to change?

R's,
John



>> On Sep 21, 2018 at 10:49,  <John R Levine (mailto:[e-mail])>  wrote:
>>   >  I strongly agree, and would go further. 
>> >  
>> >  As I see it, the HRPC suffers fundamental problems from both 
>> >  participation and its charter. 
>>
>> Thanks. I was going to write something like that but you said it better. 
>>
>> There are inherent tensions among different human rights. Free speech is 
>> great, but it enables trolling, phishing, and swatting. Censorship is 
>> bad, but most of us would prefer to censor phishes to our parents and 
>> tweets of porn photos with our daughters' faces pasted in. The 
>> traditional assertion is that the response to bad speech is more speech, 
>> but that was from an era when printing presses were expensive, and there 
>> weren't million-bot armies of screaming trolls. It is possible to think 
>> productively about this tension, as Dave Clark did in his terrific plenary 
>> talk at IETF 98, but unfortunately, he is an outlier. 
>>
>> I have spent over a decade arguing with people who imagine themselves to 
>> be human rights advocates and are unwilling to consider the implications 
>> of their narrow focus on speech and anonymity. (This month in the ICANN 
>> WHOIS debate, a well known professor in Georgia is spluttering that every 
>> security researcher who says that they use WHOIS data to shut down malware 
>> and catch crooks is lying.) I am not interested in joining HRPC because, 
>> like Eliot, I see no evidence of willingness to engagem with the real 
>> range of human rights issues. 
>>
>> In the IETF, yesterday on the regext list, "Human Rights Review of 
>> draft-ietf-regext-verificationcode" contains a long complaint that 
>> security features could be used to discriminate against people. Well, 
>> yes, that's what they're for. 
>>
>> https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/regext/current/msg01768.html 
>>
>> In anything like its current form HRPC is harmful to the IETF because it 
>> gratuitously undermines our security efforts.