[Raven] Technology to support legal intercept

[koen@win.tue.nl (Koen Holtman)]

I'll try to keep this short.  I'm only speaking for myself, etc, etc.   

First, we are dealing with a highly political issue.  As a major player in
the Internet field, there is no way the IETF can avoid 'being political'
on this: even a lack of action is a political action.

My political opinion is that the Internet community is not served by the
development or deployment of standards for legal intercept.

To answer the key questions:

The IESG wrote:
>[...]
>The key questions are:
>
>  "should the IETF develop new protocols or modify existing protocols
>  to support mechanisms whose primary purpose is to support wiretapping
>  or other law enforcement activities"

No it should not.  By staying out of the wiretap support game, the IETF
might make wiretapping more difficult or costly, which would be a good 
thing.

>
>  and
>     
>  "what should the IETF's position be on informational documents that
>  explain how to perform message or data-stream interception without 
>  protocol modifications".

Such documents should not be accepted into the RFC series or another
formal IETF series.  This makes the series more restrictive, which is
arguably a bad thing.  But if such documents were accepted this could be
used for all kinds of unwanted propaganda based on the IETF or RFC name,
no matter what IESG statements are added to the documents.  There are   
some cases where the RFC series has been used to make propaganda for a
commercial proprietary technology, but I find such things less
objectionable than possible propaganda with a political slant.


There is a tradeoff here for the IETF, between 1) not getting involved
in wiretapping technology, with the hope of slowing
down/halting/preventing deployment and, and 2) getting involved, with
the hope of steering things in a better direction.  I believe that 1)
is the best way to go given the current state of things.  Option 2)
would become interesting at a point in time where a very invasive
non-IETF protocol threatens to take over the world, and if there was
some hope of replacing this protocol with a more constrained IETF
version.  I don't think there is any threat of such a thing yet, if
anything these seems to be a slow but steady move towards end-to-end
encryption, but it would pay to keep an eye on developments.


Koen.

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