Subject: Re: delegating (portions of) ietf list disciplinary process (fwd)

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 21:20:31 -0400 (EDT)

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, Dave Singer wrote:

> >This was offlist, but I think it is relevant, now to similar 
> >questions raised by
> >others.
> 
> Yes, emailed to you offlist.  Do you have NO idea of professional 
> courtesy?  You do not post personal emails by other people without 
> their permission.  You needed to ASK first whether I minded.

Your points were relevant, and they were sent to the IETF Chair. Thus, you don't
have any privacy interest in it.

There are no privacy interests in official business communication, unless you
have an NDA arranged in advance.

If you send a letter to the FCC about Verizon, Verizon is entitled to publish
that letter without your permission. 

It seems that you have no idea of the difference between personal communication
and professional business communication. But I've also just learned that the
distinction between personal and official actions is a problem at the IETF.

		--Dean

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---

From: Ken Raeburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:40:40 -0400

> have an NDA arranged in advance.

Perhaps there is no legal standing for an expectation of privacy.   
Still, it is generally considered discourteous among most serious  
email users, I think.  But we seem to have gone past the point where  
that matters to people.

So, if I wanted to make comments to you about IETF matters, people's  
personal conduct on mailing lists, etc, that I didn't want made  
public to fuel arguments I specifically don't want to add to, I  
should ask you to sign an NDA first?  Got it, I'll keep that in mind.

This has been vaguely entertaining for a while, at least until a  
friend of mine became one of the side targets.  But frankly, not  
being one of the ombudspeople or netiquette committee members that  
don't exist (yet), and without any more authority than anyone else  
yammering on this list to investigate or enforce anything in this  
matter, while I'm a fan of open process, I'm having difficulty  
maintaining any real interest except in that car-crash-on-the-side-of- 
the-road way.

I like Brian's ideas for ombudspeople or a netiquette committee,  
especially since part of the standard operating procedure in these  
things these days seems to be to level accusations of improper  
behavior at the IESG and/or the Chair, if only for not siding with  
the complainant against the WG chair or IESG member or whomever.  I'm  
concerned that a netiquette committee will be treated exactly the  
same way, though perhaps a group of people with little or no interest  
in the actual technical outcome of the discussion triggering a  
complaint will be harder to characterize as biased.  It's sad that we  
seem to have come to this point, though at our size and with the  
importance of the Internet in today's world, not surprising, I guess.

Ken

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 09:39:56 -0400 (EDT)

Let me ask you Ken: Are you participating in the IETF as part of your job?  Or
are you just here for personal kicks?

> Perhaps there is no legal standing for an expectation of privacy.   

It has nothing to do with legal standing. Its a question of etiquette.  Office
etiquette and backyard-fence etiquette are different.

> Still, it is generally considered discourteous among most serious email users,
> I think.  But we seem to have gone past the point where that matters to
> people.

This is only true with respect to PERSONAL communication. BUSINESS communication
is not personal communication.  

If my friends tell me something personal outside of business, I keep it private,
because its personal.  My friends don't write personal notes to the IETF Chair
complaining about me and my company. [certainly not feigning having no
position.] That would be business, and they probably wouldn't be my friends
anymore.

If you file a motion with the FCC or write a nasty gram to the IETF Chair, its a
business document. I have every right to publish it. Its not personal. 

And I do business favors, too, but I have no obligation to do so.

You don't understand the distinction between business and personal.

Actually, I'm now convinced that this is the whole problem with the abuse at the
IETF: An inability to distinguish between personal and organizational interests
and subject matter.

> So, if I wanted to make comments to you about IETF matters, people's personal
> conduct on mailing lists, etc, that I didn't want made public to fuel
> arguments I specifically don't want to add to, I should ask you to sign an NDA
> first?  Got it, I'll keep that in mind.

Those are business topics.  If you are concerned about "fueling" something, then
you should keep silent. Only a lack of fact adds "fuel", otherwise known as
hyperbole.  You should consider your business commications differently from your
personal communications.

> This has been vaguely entertaining for a while, at least until a friend of
> mine became one of the side targets.

Oh, I sympathize.  I thought it funny too, until I became a target of repeated
abuse, defamation, and disparagement for merely making true statements that
counterfeit anti-spammers didn't like.

The good thing is, lies wash off. But the truth sticks with you forever. Once
you are a Court-proven liar, associate with a court-proven liar, dishonest etc.,
that doesn't go away.  Alan Brown will be a 3-time court proven liar for the
rest of his life, unless he becomes a 4-time court proven liar.  Nothing he does
will ever remove that.  

Even a lesser miscreant, Chris Neill, fired for conducting open relay abuse he
was convinced was undetectable in 1999, just recently sent me a nasty gram.  6 
years later, and he hasn't forgotten. 

		--Dean

---

From: Ken Raeburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 17:02:48 -0400

> are you just here for personal kicks?

It's part of my job; has been for a few years.

> etiquette and backyard-fence etiquette are different.

True.

>> email users,

"Business communication" is not one homogeneous class of  
communications.  Technical matters on the IETF lists are one thing;  
personnel discussions about employees would be quite another.  And  
the level of privacy expected, and the degree of rudeness associated  
with publishing someone's not-previously-public communications, vary;  
they are not binary choices.  Email I might exchange with selected  
individuals outside MIT on how to implement some feature in our (open  
source, repository-accessible) product would fall somewhere in  
between.  In my experience there is certainly work-related email that  
is not legally required to be private but would be considered rude to  
disseminate widely without getting permission.

In this particular case, where it sounds like the mailing list was  
explicitly kept off the recipient list, that sounds like a pretty  
clear indication that the sender probably didn't want it as public as  
the previous mail being responded to -- much as if someone took you  
aside from a crowd to make a couple of comments instead of shouting  
at you in the middle of the room.  Perhaps you don't distinguish  
those cases; other people do.  But apparently your interpretation of  
business etiquette trumps his wishes, and whatever his intent was in  
not including the IETF at large ... in your mind, though apparently  
not his, and not mine.

> You don't understand the distinction between business and personal.

I understand that the type of a communication cannot be fully  
represented in one binary digit.

> IETF: An inability to distinguish between personal and  

There may be some of that.  I strongly doubt that's all there is to  
it, though.

> hyperbole.

Sometimes what's needed is to encourage both sides to step back a bit  
from a dispute for a while, or suggest that one side use or abandon  
some specific line of argument to make the discussion more  
productive.  I think that's sometimes better done in private  
communication with individual parties rather than in public, but it's  
still business, and one shouldn't need an NDA to figure out that it's  
preferably not to be made public.  (Then again, I guess sometimes  
making it public -- "look!  even so-and-so thinks you're a loser!   
clearly I'm right!" -- may suit one person's desire to fan the  
flames, or to "win" at all costs.  It may be jumping to conclusions  
to think that *everyone* wants a polite, productive discussion, or  
that they're capable of engaging in one in the face of strong  
opposition....)

I'm sad to say, I've actually looked at a little of the stuff you've  
posted on the web page you set up recently, concerning Ted Ts'o.  I  
picked the "July 1" off-list stuff to look at, briefly.  From that  
admittedly small sample... let me try to phrase this carefully to  
avoid anything that might be construed as an ad-hominem attack: I  
disagree with your summary of some of the messages I reviewed.

Ted disagrees with you on the importance of some things you bring up,  
and says what you're presenting isn't very useful (to the discussion  
at hand, I would assume he meant, on reading his message); your  
summary turns this into ``Tso says facts are "not useful" to the  
IETF.''  Without a qualifier like "these facts" and "this  
discussion", that's an unsupported, even absurd, generalization;  
you're ascribing to Ted statements that he did not make.

Ted asked for information on the "court-proven liars" (plural, your  
phrase), and you seem to have responded with info on multiple court  
cases against one person.  Ted points that out, and uses the somewhat  
inaccurate description "lost a lawsuit" in doing so.  He does  
acknowledge that this *one* person is, in at least one instance, a  
"court-proven liar" as you put it; his wording could be read to  
suggest, but does not actually state (as your summary says he does),  
that there was only one lawsuit.  "Has lost such a lawsuit", to me,  
does not at all suggest "only one"; "person who lost a lawsuit" does  
suggest it somewhat, in this context.  "One proven act" would suggest  
it more strongly, though by that point he's talking in more general  
terms.

But his emphasis appears to be on the number of defendants rather  
than lawsuits, and that whole aspect isn't the main thrust of his  
message, which is suggesting that the focus should be on the disputed  
statement rather than the character of the person making it.  And if  
you accept Ted's point that the lawsuits aren't as important as  
examining the disputed statement, the difference between the logical  
"there exists a lawsuit" and "there were three of them" isn't very  
important -- a logical step I think he should've made more explicit  
in his message -- and then the references to "a lawsuit" and "one  
proven act" are more clearly in the "there exists" sense.  (And if I  
were in Ted's shoes at that time, I probably would've ignored the  
implied suggestion that I go hunt through your web site or use Google  
to try to find the information I had asked you to provide on the  
other people your use of the plural implies.)

I haven't read up on enough of the context to form an opinion on the  
reputation versus statement accuracy issue in this instance.

So, to summarize my look at a few of the messages: You both lose  
points for some of your statements or how you tried to make your  
arguments, and the accuracy of the summary page is questionable.   
None of it, so far, really suggests any sort of professional  
dishonesty on Ted's part to me.  (If this were a research paper  
instead of an email message, I'd probably want him to be much more  
careful and even pedantic in his arguments, but that would be about  
the quality of the work, not honesty.)

Bored now, and not interested in the case under discussion in that  
old thread; I'm going to stop digging....

Ken

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:33:18 +0200

--On torsdag, september 29, 2005 17:02:48 -0400 Ken Raeburn 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> So, to summarize my look at a few of the messages: You both lose  points
> for some of your statements or how you tried to make your  arguments, and
> the accuracy of the summary page is questionable.   None of it, so far,
> really suggests any sort of professional  dishonesty on Ted's part to me.
> (If this were a research paper  instead of an email message, I'd probably
> want him to be much more  careful and even pedantic in his arguments, but
> that would be about  the quality of the work, not honesty.)

I think you illustrate quite well why I'm glad I don't have to talk to Dean 
Anderson any more.

Any conversation where I can't toss of a casual remark without getting 
virtually crucified for it is a conversation not worth having.

---

From: Alexis Turner <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 17:41:54 -0400 (EDT)

Geez, Harald.  You misspelled "off."  Am I going to have to virtually
crucify you in front of the list for this?
-Alexis

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:

::I think you illustrate quite well why I'm glad I don't have to talk to Dean
::Anderson any more.
::
::Any conversation where I can't toss of a casual remark without getting
::virtually crucified for it is a conversation not worth having.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 19:38:48 +0200

> crucify you in front of the list for this?

yes.

-- 

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