[perpass] Some personal thoughts on the impact of pervasive monitoring

Ted Hardie <ted.ietf@gmail.com> Sun, 20 October 2013 01:21 UTC

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From: Ted Hardie <ted.ietf@gmail.com>
To: perpass@ietf.org
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Subject: [perpass] Some personal thoughts on the impact of pervasive monitoring
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Like most folks involved in this list, I have a personal response to the
current situation and some thoughts on how it will impact my or our work in
the future.  Since I expect we will pretty short of mic time in Vancouver
for thoughts like these, I decided to write them out.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hardie-perpass-touchstone-00

is the result.  It's quite short but a quick summary is this:

Pervasive monitoring induces self-censoring which harms the Internet and
its users.  At the scale of the modern Internet, that means it harms
humanity.

We can and should change our approach to Internet engineering and system
design to deal with this.  There will be costs for that, but we should pay
them.

It helps me, personally, to focus on a single user when asking whether a
system or protocol is appropriate in the current environment.  The draft
lays out why.

regards,

Ted Hardie