On Fri, 2009-09-18 at 15:11 -0400, Ross Callon wrote:
Speaking solely as an individual, providing only my personal opinion:
I think that this is not acceptable and we should not sign it.
I understand that no location is perfect. However, I think that this
goes well beyond what we normally put up with and well beyond what we
should put up with.
There are two classes of issues which concern me:
The first is the risk to the IETF. I understand that the likelihood of
anything happening as a result of this is very low. However, the IETF
is a very unruly and opinionated group, and is probably more unruly
than other groups that have recently met in China (or anywhere else).
We have little idea what IETF attendees will do either in spite of or
even because of this restriction. It would not be surprising to have
some sort of major dust-up at the IESG plenary over this issue, and we
don't know how the host country officials would react to this. Also,
while the risk of the meeting being stopped in the middle seems very
low, if it did happen this would be a very bad result for all
concerned. If one IETF attendee were to be booted out of the hosting
country based on something that they said or put on their slides or in
a jabber room even that would be very bad.
Also, from a moral point of view I don't think that we should accept
this. Freedom of speech is a very basic freedom that is guaranteed in
a wide range of countries (although of course not all). The people
who live there don't have the ability to say "no" without serious
consequences. We DO have the ability to say no, and I think that we
should.
Again, this is just my personal opinion, and not the opinion of any
group nor organization that I might happen to be associated with.
thanks, Ross
+1
// Steve
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