Re: [TLS] chairs - please shutdown wiretapping discussion...

[Kyle Rose <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 10:22 AM, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Jul 12, 2017, at 10:18 AM, Kyle Rose <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> We need to dispel the myth that mere inaction on our part will on its own
> prevent implementation of these mechanisms, if for no other reason but to
> redirect energy to the political arena where the pervasive monitoring
> battles *are* actually fought.
>
>
> Inaction on our part will prevent the code from going into the common
> distributions.   That's not worthless.
>

Which will have zero impact on pervasive surveillance until some government
decides they want to use this mechanism or something like it and mandates
that it be implemented universally within their borders. Then it will
appear in short order, even if the government has to hire their own code
monkeys to do it, at which point it will continue to have zero impact on
pervasive surveillance.

Again, I'm not recommending any TLS distribution implement this, only that
we stop fooling ourselves into believing that refusing to standardize a
mechanism like this will prevent one from being implemented when someone
decides they want it.

This is fundamentally different from the question of standardizing
potentially privacy-violating protocol extensions that need to survive
end-to-end on the internet to be useful to the third party: this entire
functionality can be implemented at a single endpoint without anyone else's
permission or custom interop.

Kyle