Re: [Pearg] Research Group Last Call for "A Survey of Worldwide Censorship Techniques"

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Mallory,

I wanted to come back to something you wrote:

> On 26 May 2020, at 19:04, Mallory Knodel <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Because while there are indeed recognized legal, legitimate and proportional reasons why the rights to free expression and to access information should be violated, censorship measures should not be taken without careful consideration as it is a human rights matter.

Regardless of the terminology, it seems to me that there is another aspect that the document could capture that is related to the IETF.  In the introduction, the authors write:

   There is also a growing field of
   academic study of censorship circumvention (see the review article of
   [Tschantz-2016]), results from which we seek to make relevant here
   for protocol designers and implementers.
I wonder if it would be good to elaborate this.  Be a bit more explicit as to what the relevancies are.  Are these cautionary tales for instance, wherein some cases the use of the technology for censorship was not what the engineers had in mind?  How would you like engineers to evaluate technology tradeoffs?
This allows us to address one additional point that I’d suggest the RG to consider:  the document motivation could be strengthened.  Why is this document important?  Who is it relevant to?  This might also explain why there is no conclusion or desired next steps.  Good that they've enumerated various mechanisms.  Would they like the IETF to review those points with an eye toward avoiding inadvertent avenues to additional censorship?  What if anything would be good for PEARG to follow up?  I’m not suggesting many paragraphs, but one or two wouldn’t be out of line.
Eliot