On 1/1/2014 4:08 AM, Eliot Lear wrote:
As to whether this draft is political, it cannot be stressed enough that
if one group of people can subvert our architecture, others can as well.
Our political statement, such as it is, is that in order to maintain
confidence in the Internet, our protocol suite should be resistant to
this sort of thing, but within the bounds of pragmatism.
Let me suggest that this is exactly the wrong way to talk about the
issue, in the IETF. Again, it's not that the statement is wrong, but
that it is not the way engineers need to approach work.
Here's engineering phrasing that gets us doing the same work, but
without worrying about the human factor of "confidence". That is, it
uses phrasing that matches all the other work we do, rather than placing
us into some sort of social protection task:
There is a substantial community in the Internet wishing to have
its data and activities protected against pervasive monitoring. The
IETF needs to design specifications and practices (existing and new)
with the means to ensure such protection.
Another reason of why we should stay out of the more exciting language
about pervasive monitoring is that it leads us into making technical
statements that are wrong. Pervasive monitoring has not 'subverted' any
architecture. It has simply taken advantage of holes in the architecture.
There is a strong market request that we close those holes.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net