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Officials of the ISOC

Scandals

Other Participants and Former Officials

  • Brian Carpenter
  • Geoff Huston
  • Paul Vixie
  • David Crocker

ISOC IETF Activity

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What would Jon Postel have said?

Dr. Postel assiduously avoided conflicts of interest. In 1995, as the Internet was growing into a commercial business, a reporter asked him why he had repeatedly turned down opportunities to pursue wealth. He replied that starting a company to profit from his activities would have amounted to what he called a ''violation of public trust.'' (source The NY Times)

News

September 2007 Cullen Jennings removes GEO-PRIV Chairs, installs Cronies. This is somewhat old news, but has just recently been noticed. Cullen Jennings has removed both GEO-PRIV chairs when the Working Group refused to approve a Cisco proposal. An appeal was filed citing the interference in the IETF process to remove the chairs, interference in the consensus process, and the conflict of interest of Jennings. In almost typical fashion, the IESG has denied the indisputable facts, and rejected the appeal Holy anti-trust, batman. Any "discretion" exercised by an agent has to be reasonably in the interests of the principal (the employer) for which one is acting. This "discretion" is also subject to the laws regarding extortion, anti-trust and the Law of Agency, etc. The This episode demonstrates that the IESG has no regard for the law in its exercise of power.

February 2009 TLS-AUTHZ Fails Fourth Last Call: 6 approve to 178 oppose. During the forth last call of this unpopular document, FSF succeeded in organizing public opposition with over 136 people associated with the FSF (cc'ing campaigns@fsf.org) opposed the TLS-AUTHZ document. In total: 6 people approve the document, not counting the sponsor and author. 178 people oppose the document. There were some more schenanigans. Besides the removal of an unfavorable IPR 765, Sponsor Tim Polk (business partner of Housley), changed the document status from "Experimental" to "Proposed Standard", without announcement.

February 2009 More TLS-AUTHZ Misconduct: IESG removes Redphone IPR Disclosure Despite giving assurances that IPR documents would never be removed, and despite a corporate policy of not deleting history, and despite a duty not to destroy evidence, the IESG reneged on all of that to remove IPR 765, the first disclosure by Redphone that set off the TLS-AUTHZ controversy. This disclosure has been cited by critics of Redphone, Russ Housley, Tim Polk and the IESG as evidence of bad faith.

January 2008 IESG Misrepresents Corporate Status, Denies Democratic Member Rights The IESG filed an appeal response to a message (not an appeal) sent by Anderson to the IESG. Anderson's message had complained of legal misconduct by the IPR-WG Chair Harald Alverstrand. In the response, the IESG stated falsely the IETF is not subject to the law on corporations, misrepresentating the material fact that the IETF and the IESG are part of the Internet Society, Inc.

September 30, 2007 Whistblower silenced on IPR-WG Russ Housley, Tim Polk and Harald Alvestrand silence whistle-blower Dean Anderson after well-founded complaints of misconduct are posted to the "IPR" Working Group regarding the patent-pending tls-authz protocol and past misconduct. Anderson is also the President of the League for Programming Freedom(LPF), a non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman to fight software patents and user interface copyrights. The IETF has previously tried to cover-up misconduct regarding omitted patent disclosures.

September 25, 2007 Tim Polk issues Third Last Call on draft-housley-tls-authz-extns in an attempt to obtain approval of non-free, patented protocol, despite the past history and the scandal involving Russ Housley. Polk also has a conflict of interest, and has made misstatements of fact.

June 19th, 2007 Ron Bonica Announces that Geoff Huston has resigned as Chair of the GROW Working Group. Huston, as Chair of the GROW WG, used "hardball tactics", and false charges of misconduct to silence critics and approve RFC4786 (draft-ietf-grow-anycast). This RFC asserted that Anycast (the technique of using the same IP address on several computers), was stable for stateful protocols. Using Anycast for stateful services, like TCP DNS, is controversial. Several root operators need the (false) claim of stateful stability to mislead the government oversight organizations into approving Anycast Root DNS operations. Their motive for doing this is so that they can sell copies of Root DNS servers to ISPs. Huston is employeed by a customer of ISC.ORG, one of the root operators promoting this idea, and has a conflict of interest in the matter.

March 2007. David Kessens is replaced by Ron Bonica. No reason is given. In November, Kessens announced his availablity to continue as Area Director. Kessens participated in false charges to silence discussion of Stateful Root DNS Anycast, and played "hardball" to get the IESG to approve RFC 4786 (draft-ietf-grow-anycast)

March 2007. Brian Carpenter is replaced as IETF Chair by Russ Housley. Housley is under investigation for deceiving the IESG and IETF about patents which apply to a draft Housley wrote. While Housley knew of patent during the whole time the draft was being reviewed, Housley did not disclose this information, and represented a number of times in documents submitted to the IETF that all patents he was aware of had been disclosed. The Patent Policy of the IETF, RFC 3979 requires disclosure of any patents that may apply.