[discuss] technical vs societal issues (was: Report from the BR meeting local organizing group - Dec 2013)

Mon Dec 23 04:18:47 UTC 2013

On Dec 22, 2013, at 6:36 PM, S Moonesamy <sm+1net at elandsys.com> wrote:

> I can give you a magic box which provides you with the ability to communicate with many people in the world. It also allows many people to communicate with you.  Some of these people may be bad people.  The architecture can be fixed to prevent bad people from communicating with you.  I would have to ask you to define "bad people" to implement that fix in the magic box.

Please do not change your magic box to prevent communication with anyone.

However, if a given communication turns out to be highly problematic (for
example, resulting in a stadium being evacuated because of a bomb scare,
or the solicitation of a very young girl to run away to her new "friend")
then your magic box should be able to provide some handle or pointer to 
the real-world origin (e.g. reference to organization which is the origin
of the communication and its legal jurisdiction) so that there can readily
be some follow-on discussion about the communication.

The idea of bad people or good people is rather simplistic; the real-world
has parties, jurisdictions, civil and criminal legal code, privacy and anonymity 
rights, and the best the Internet can do be able to provide the context that
allows for reliable and appropriately adhjucated mapping between online entities 
to real-world parties and their legal jurisdictions when necessary.

Hopefully, your magic box will support this functionality, particular since
the Internet does a terrible job providing this functionality today...
The problematic communication itself is generally a "societal / political"
issue, but the failure of the Internet to reliably provide the necessary 
real-world mapping prevents engagement of existing real-world mechanisms for 
response and is itself a technical/operational deficiency of the Internet.

> I'll assume that innovative or ingenious solutions are possible.  Before getting into solutions it would help to get an understanding of what the problems are, or as what is written above, bring clarity to the issues.

See above - Thanks!
/John

Disclaimer:  My views alone. 