--On Saturday, December 07, 2013 10:01 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<brian(_dot_)e(_dot_)carpenter(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
...this is a social, economic and political issue outside the
IETF's scope. Our ethical obligation as engineers is clear to
me: make the Internet as secure as possible, from all security
points of view including privacy. Actually the recent
revelations don't change a thing except that they have brought
a well understood attack model into public view and underlined
that we need to defend against it.
My observation is that no technological policy applied with complete
uniformity is ever the ideal solution. In this case, "making the
Internet as secure as possible" sounds good until one considers the
implication of allowing complete privacy for all possible criminal
activities.
I would say that our ethical obligation as engineers is not to decide
what technological policy is best for society, but rather to inform
and educate the public (in all its facets) as well as possible about
the realities and the possibilities of the technology, so that the
larger society can decide how to handle the unavoidable tradeoffs
between various benefits and costs.
Dale