Dear IAOC members,
I asked what I thought were some fairly reasonable questions on the
legalities of running a meeting as normal IETF meeting in PRC - I
carefully stayed away from social policy issues about if this was a
good place to have a meeting or not.
I was wondering if you plan to answer any of these or not? If you
don't plan to answer them, I'd rather know that then just have to
assume it. If you do plan but on answers any of them, I'd love to find
out any answers you currently know and also find out which question
you plan not to answer, and to find out the timelines of when you
might have an answer for questions you can't currently answer. I
don't have any problem with you telling me some of these questions are
TSTA (too stupid to answer).
Thanks, Cullen
On Sep 23, 2009, at 9:45 PM, Cullen Jennings wrote:
IAOC,
I'm trying to understand what is political speech in China. The
Geopriv WG deals with protecting users' location privacy. The
policies of more than one country have come up in geopriv meetings
in very derogatory terms. There have been very derogatory comments
made by people about the US's wiretap policy. Unless someone can
point me at specifics of what is or is not OK, I would find this
very concerning. We also regularly discuss issues around Taiwan/
China, cryptography, wiretap, DNS root server location, reverse
engineering, and so on. Clearly most the people involved with IETF
would never want to break the laws of the country they are visiting
but the question is do we actually understand the laws and what
impact do they have on our technical work? To help us make informed
decision about whether these terms are issues or not:
1) What is political speech in China? And can we explain that to
IETF participants well enough that they know what is OK and what is
not.
2) Are there any special rules about publishing and broadcasting? I
note that the IETF, unlike most other groups having meetings,
broadcasts the meetings live over the internet, which will be both
publishing the material and exporting it outside of the PRC.
3) Are there any rules around discussion, publication, or export of
of cryptography algorithms and technology? publishing weaknesses of
national crypto algorithms?
4) Many of our participants use communications products (like jabber
clients) that they helped develop and include strong cryptography.
Do they need permission to use these in China?
5) When discussing what I think of as technical issues, many
participants regularly treat Taiwan and PRC as two different
countries and currently recognize both of them as separate countries
in their own right. I'd actually venture a guess that there is
strong IETF consensus they should be treated this way. Could any
discussions like this be viewed as political speech? What are the
rules on this?
6) It is not core to IETF work but some of us do some interop of
running code for IETF protocols under development sometimes at IETF.
This would be about the right timing for running P2PSIP code, but
that requires us to to run a local CA. Is any special permission
needed to run a CA in China?
7) Would we be OK running a BOF on techniques for firewall
advancement in general and in particular on getting around any
firewalls China runs? [Seriously, you know someone will propose this
BOF, the questions is could we run it or not?]
8) Given the Chairs for WG set the agendas and such, I am assuming
that a reasonable person would consider all the presentation done by
presenters at the front of the room to be things that are under
control of the client. Is this the assumption the IAOC is working
under too?
9) What is the IETF's potential liability here. If the meeting was
canceled on Monday, everyone checked out of hotels early and paid a
one day change fee, would the IETF be responsible for the hotel's
loss of revenue for the Wednesday through Friday nights?
10) If the meeting is canceled, will the IETF be reimbursing the
registration fees?
11) Given the IETF would be depending on the actions of the
participants of the meeting to meet the contract, it would seem very
prudent to me to make sure that each participant agreed to this.
Will you be asking each participant to sign an agreement agreeing to
these terms?
12) Do you all feel like you need a beer yet?
I'm trying to get to the bottom about what is legal and what is not
in the PRC. Ignorance is not an excuse for the law in any country
and when I don't know if something is legal or not, I don't do it.
Right now I am looking for input from knowledgeable people on these
questions. I imagine the IAOC has looked into many of these and
would appreciate understanding what you have found.
Thanks, Cullen
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf