On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 05:37:37AM -0800, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
I think some of Laksminath's concern is valid.
But I think the solution to the problem is simple:
Make it publicly known who is on the technical staff that supports the
Nomcom, and make it clear that these people:
1) May learn Nomcom information as a side effect of their technical work to
support Nomcom
2) Have promised not to reveal that information to others, and have
promised not to take any other action based on that information (apart from
fixing technical problems)
This is analogous to the role of an email postmaster: He *can* read any
mail on the system, if he really wants to, but we trust him to not *do* it
- or, if he has to during debugging, we trust him to "forget" what he's
read.
If people are so paranoid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htouchy about this subject,
that's a good thing of course. But unless people are using PGP or
S/MIME to encrypt all traffic to and from the nomcom list these days,
note that this list won't be complete. You would also need to include
all of the e-mail postmaster staff servicing the e-mail addresses of
everyone on the nomcom....
And if you don't force people to encrypt traffic on the inbound side,
and just do the PGP encryption at the reflector (a common setup),
someone who is sniffing packets in the corporate intranet of any of
the nomcom members could also acquire quite a bit of significant
information, from the quoted replies as well as the from the posted
text of said nomcom members --- and let's not forget the
fileserver/backup admins if people are decrypting the messages and
storing the messages in their decrypted form in their NFS home
directories.
<For the joke impaired --- I'm taking this to extremes just to show
how silly we can get --- or, if you are truly paranoid and wanting to
treat this information as carefully as the US government might want to
treet Top Secret classified information, to point out how hard this
would be and how this would almost certainly impact on the
productivity of the nomcom. Some amount of common sense is required
here, obviously.>
I trust that Henrik thought this was "so obvious it didn't need mentioning".
I would have thought this was kind of obvious, but maybe that's
because I had postmaster duties at MIT for almost a decade....
- Ted
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