Re: Request for community guidance on issue concerning a future meeting

I have been in a couple of meetings in China, and everything always went 
smoothly. Arrival process at the airport is one of the moat pleasant 
that I've had outside Schengen area in EU. There is a lot of university 
and commercial activity on new Internet technology, and going there 
gives one typically a very different, fresh viewpoint. I never had any 
problems with my VPN and had also direct access to the sites that I use 
daily. Its a large country with very large variations in the level of 
modernization and infrastructure, e.g., hotel, restaurant and Internet 
connection quality can vary quite a bit. Some of my colleagues in the 
same lab have also been over there, e.g., the 3GPP security group has 
met there several times (and they often deal with topics such as 
encryption or anonymity) and the experience was similar.
With regards to the hotel clause I need to say that I'm not an expert in 
writing hotel contracts. But I'll just that there are plenty of laws 
that one has to obey in every country. Unfortunately, there may not 
always be an bulletproof way to avoid getting into problems with 
purposefully vague laws. If the authorities really wanted to, I'm sure a 
sizable fraction of the IETF could be investigated in many countries 
for, say, export of encryption software or just being a crypto expert 
(see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Sklyarov), 
reverse-engineering which might be a violation of DCMA (see, e.g., 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography#Digital_rights_management), 
copyright violations for your personal benefit, building software or 
protocols that allow others to violate someone's copyright (we have 
several working groups trying to improve P2P technology), or linking to 
infringing content*. But for some reason none of us are suddenly scared 
about these things. That's because we know from experience that when we 
go to a country, we are not suddenly all arrested. I would suggest the 
way to resolve our current question is to look for other meetings that 
have taken place in China. If operator forums, 3GPP, IEEE, a few major 
scientific conferences on our field, etc have successfully met there, I 
think we should go as well.
I also strongly believe that political views should not matter for this 
discussion. For the record, I'm not happy with the actions of the 
Chinese government. But I'm also unhappy with many other governments, 
including the one in my own country. If we start blaming a particular 
country, there's a lot of blame to go around.
Jari

*) Message to whoever intercepts this e-mail: Naturally, I have not been 
involved with any of the listed activities :-)
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf