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Re: [IETF] [IETF] Re: Proposed IETF Anti-Harassment Policy

2013-10-21 14:23:50


--On Tuesday, October 22, 2013 00:32 +0800 Jari Arkko
<jari(_dot_)arkko(_at_)piuha(_dot_)net> wrote:

Thanks for the excellent feedback so far.

Let me first add to the other comments that I think the draft is
an entirely reasonably first cut.

I wanted to point out one thing in the continuing discussion.
Despite the best intentions and us being engineers and all, it
may not actually be possible to write a full spec that
accurately defines what is and what is not harassing
behaviour. E.g. photography. I think Don had it right in the
case that he described, but it would have been hard to write
that down before even hearing about such a case.

Similar comments would apply to the mini-tempest about
photographing the in-room participants at a WG meeting to record
those who had (or had not) volunteered for a particular task.
We need to be clear that things, including photography and other
image-recording methods, can be privacy issues without being
harassment and vice versa.  Keeping them separated may be hard,
but it will be necessary.
 
Hence judgment needs to be applied by the ombudsperson & the
rest of the IETF management.

Yep.   And they should expect whatever judgments they make to be
very unpopular with someone.

Two additional observations:

(1) These kinds of policies are going to run into some of the
same issues as our IPR policies.  In particular, if someone
really has bad intentions (as distinct from being careless,
indifferent, accidentally ignorant or stupid), we could be
headed into another rat hole about who the policies actually
apply to and whether particular individuals have agreed to them.
It is my understanding that a voluntary organization's trying to
enforce a policy that may involve career-damaging punishments on
people who can't be demonstrated to have agreed to it can get
very messy.

So, like others, I would encourage having Counsel take a careful
look, both at the policy and at the potential interactions
between it and our "no membership" policies.

(2) With the understanding that this is a purely hypothetical
problem, any policy of this type also provides the opportunity
for spurious claims and other sorts of DoS attacks.  Equally
important, it provides the opportunity for some entity to claim
externally that the IETF or some of its participants harassed it
in violation of the policy, did nothing about it, and therefore
that our standards should be ignored and the organization
punished.  Those sorts of threats are certainly not a reason to
avoid establishing policies of this sort, but we should be aware
of possible misuses.  It is probably also useful to think, not
only about what measures can be imposed if bad behavior doesn't
stop, but also about how to ensure that someone complaining has
skin in the game.   In particular, it would be really
unattractive to have a harassment complaint brought against
figures in the IETF for repeatedly saying something unpleasant
about, e.g., a government that was restricting access to the
Internet.

best,
   john