Subject: Re: Last Call: <draft-farrell-perpass-attack-02.txt> (Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack) to Best Current Practice

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2014 12:12:48 -0500

Another message from the 11-12 December thread, then I'm going
to try to crawl back out of this and get some work done...

--On Thursday, December 12, 2013 15:20 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> If it is, then it would seem to call for "ubiquitous
>> confidentiality" unless you are making a very fine point.
> 
> Indeed it is making a fine point - what it calls for is the
> IETF to provide technological mechanisms that allow operators
> and users to protect privacy. To what extent those mechanisms
> are deployed is not under the IETF's control and will
> presumably vary between countries.

Brian,

I'm sorry, but, beyond a certain point, that sets you (and us)
up for a position that has an extremely poor ethical (and
engineering) history.  The worst examples take us straight to
various principles that have names but "we just invented this
technology, you can't blame us for how it was used or its
consequences" is perhaps the least negative of them of those
examples.  It is also, at least IMO, bad engineering because
good engineering has to consider the entire constraint space and
system, even if the constraints are economic or social and not
just physics.

Worse, we are already more than halfway into the sociopolitical
side of the problem by even getting started in this discussion.
Even there may be some associated technical problems and
opportunities, privacy isn't a technical problem either.  More
important, the expectation of privacy isn't a technical problem;
we create a technical problem only when we assume that
expectation and its reasonableness.   I happen to disagree with
those who say "ok, it can be ignored" or "any expectation of
privacy has become unreasonable" and assume you do too, but,
when I complain about pain when I try to perform particular
actions, my physician is fond of saying "so don't do that".  If
one really has no expectation of privacy, then there is no
technical or other problem with surveillance, pervasive or
otherwise.  To go as far as we are going and then appeal to "not
a technical problem" or, worse, ethical imperatives about the
consequences of how our work is applied is, to be polite,
disingenuous.

best,
    john

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2014 08:28:31 +1300

> examples.  

That might depend on how one feels about Mikhail Kalashnikov's defence:
("It is not my fault that the Kalashnikov was used in many troubled places.
I think the policies of these countries are to blame, not the designers.")
But I think you're over-interpreting my words. All IETF standards
are voluntary, so anything we specify that protects privacy is
also voluntary and we can't force people to use it.

> It is also, at least IMO, bad engineering because

I can't disagree. Unfortunately the constraint space includes
jurisdictions with things like FISA courts or worse.

> consequences of how our work is applied is, to be polite,

Yes. All I intended was to be realistic: whatever we specify,
we can't prevent people ignoring it. I think we have a lot of
running code proof of that.

    Brian