On 2015-06-26 20:46, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Joe Touch <touch(_at_)isi(_dot_)edu
<mailto:touch(_at_)isi(_dot_)edu>> wrote:
On 6/26/2015 12:37 AM, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
> Den 25. juni 2015 17:56, skrev Joe Touch:
>> Nope. The IETF isn't political at all.
>
> We take positions, and we're proud of it.
>
> A Mission Statement for the IETF (RFC 3935) section 4.1 is most
explicit:
>
> The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF. We want
> the Internet to be useful for communities that share our commitment
> to openness and fairness. We embrace technical concepts such as
> decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing of
> resources, because those concepts resonate with the core values of
> the IETF community. These concepts have little to do with the
> technology that's possible, and much to do with the technology that
> we choose to create.
IMO, your interpretation of this as relating to political issues
mistakes the IETF for EFF.
Further, organizations that promote political agendas take great pains
to separate those events (and financial resources) from non-political
meetings. Otherwise, e.g., those on US gov't funds might be questioned
about their registration fees here.
I take the above instead to mean that the IETF should not "let a
thousand flowers bloom" but rather pick technologies based on their core
values. When the IETF has had opportunity to do this, they have
summarily and repeatedly failed in favor of the profits of their
participants. I have said repeatedly that "sometimes the right answer is
'no'".
Among the Snowden documents was the disclosure that the NSA had been
spending taxpayer money to undermine and subvert standards activities
including IETF.
As I pointed out to several folk in the administration after the
original story broke, I was asked to come out of retirement and work on
securing the net because they told me it was a matter of national
importance to secure the critical infrastructure. Now I discover that a
US government agency charged with protecting national security has been
actively sabotaging my work and that of the rest of us in the security area.
What we have created here is a technology trap that sprang shut roughly
twenty years ago with Western civilization inside. Without electricity,
sanitation and water, modern cities collapse within weeks. None of those
infrastructures have been designed for security and all are now
connected to network that allows attacks to be launched from any place
in the world with absolutely no hope of attribution.
At this point we can either let the generals in Russia China and the US
turn cyber into a new domain with the commercial and consulting
opportunities that offers or we can work on making those attacks
superfluous. Land, Sea and Air bleed three quarters of a trillion
dollars from the US exchequer every year. Are we going to allow them to
make cyber a domain and make it a round trillion?
... and that is why showing a movie about this isn't the worst idea
I've seen the IETF have in recent years.