Ted Ts'o Professional Dishonesty Accusation

This page contains email supporting the accusation of professional dishonesty by Ted Ts'o in his role as Sergeant at Arms of the IETF, for review by the IETF.

Mr. Ts'o is a Sergeant at Arms for the Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF), an activity of the Internet Society (ISOC). The Internet Society is a professional membership organization of Internet experts that comments on policies and practices and oversees a number of other boards and task forces dealing with network policy issues. The IETF offiicers and officials are the gatekeepers to the professional honesty and intregity and reputation of the IETF organization, and is a reflection of the ISOC. IETF officers and officials are expected to maintain high standards of professional honesty and integrity.

Accusation Summary

Ted Ts'o, in his official role as Sergeant at Arms, was professionally dishonest by fabricating statements and falsely attributing those statements to Dean Anderson. Ts'o was summarizing Anderson's arguments to the IETF Chair, in his official role as Sergeant at Arms of the IETF. These are not "casual remarks", but official communications involving the weighty matter of the integrity of the source of data used by the IETF. Therefore, they should be held to a much higher degree of honesty and integrity.

Ts'o also asserted false facts about how many lawsuits were lost and whether this person lied repeatedly, to the IETF Chair. Facts that are easily checked and are not ambigous. He did this repeatedly, after being repeatedly informed that his fact claim was false. The IETF Chair was informed, but took no action on these serious professional and ethical lapses.

Background on the Dispute

In mid June 2005, the IETF began a discussion of a Last Call for a draft entitled 'Email Submission Between Independent Networks' to a status of "BCP" (Best Common Practice, a status defined by RFC2026. This draft is also referred to as "draft-hutzler-spamops", or as "spamops".

Anderson and others began to raise questions about the veracity of the claims made in the "spamops" document. IETF RFC claims should be supported by facts, not based on lies and false statements. The point of community review is to review the technical merits of the draft. The statements in the draft should all be true. The draft statements about open relays promoting spam have also previously been shown to be false in legal conflict.

In response to these questions, Tony Finch produced an assertion of fact supporting the document claims. Finch claims that about 1% of his total email messages are unauthorized mail relay attempts. Anderson points out that this could be explained by customers traveling, and doesn't prove that spammers are abusing open relays. His assertion is shown to be a false assumption.

Another person, Doug Royer offers a claim that SORBS had blocked a great deal of spam on his personal email. He claims this is all spam sent from open relays. This is also a mis-interpretation. SORBS lists open proxies. And (somewhat surprisingly) SORBS claims to have focused on open proxies rather than open relays. SORBS is known to make defamatory statements against Av8 Internet, claiming falsely that Av8 Internet's IP address space is hijacked. SORBS is associated with Alan Brown, who made this claim on March 28, 2003. This is significant because Brown is also known to make false and defamatory statements about open relays, and significantly, has lost 3 Court cases to defamation, 2 claiming falsely that ISPs he didn't like had open relays. . Mr. Royer quotes the opinions of associates of known COURT-PROVEN liars to support his arguments.

Anderson and others offer their direct experiences with operating open relays, and debunk a number of myths and false claims. This paper details and debunks false claims about open relays . It is pointed out that one should only make claims one has direct experience with. That principle seems to have been ignored in this case. Having discredited the presented assertions in support for the draft claims, there is no longer any factual support for the draft claims about open relays. The spamops draft contains false statements about open relays. The sources of these false statements are 3-time Court-proven liars and/or their associates; people who lie repeatedly, and/or who don' mind associating with people who lie repeatedly. [7/13/2005 Update: In spite of the problems with integrity, the IETF ASRG working group has decided to move the draft forward anyway, thereby associating the IETF with false statements, Court-proven liars, and professional dishonesty. The AD or the IESG can still stop the draft.]

Some people didn't appreciate the facts of these court cases being posted to the IETF list, nor the facts about open relay operation reported by open relay operators. One person, former IETF Chair Harald Alvestrand, didn't appreciate the notion that the IETF shouldn't accept the claims of court proven liars. Harald Alvestrand posted a personal attack against Anderson. Anderson made a complaint to the IETF Chair regarding this attack. The IETF Chair responded that the attack was an 'irrelevant statement of fact'. David Crocker, the author of the criticized "spamops" document suggested that action should be taken against "egregious" offenders. As Alvestrands attack was the offensive comment quoted by Crocker, his message seemed to be directed at Harald Alvestrand's offensive attack. This prompted Ted Ts'o to reply that Alvestrands comment was neither "egregious" nor a personal attack. Ts'o reports on what is appropriate on the list, per RFC 3005.

[This brings us up the point where Ts'o then engages in professional misconduct, and is the background of the misconduct.]

Next, Ts'o decided he needed to consider the allegation that Brown was a court proven liar offlist. . This offlist discussion with the IETF Chair Brian Carpenter is the subject of this complaint of professional dishonesty by Ted Ts'o. The discussion is summarized below with links to the actual messages. The following people generally participated in this discussion though each message may have a unique participant list.

• Brian Carpenter, IETF Chair
• Jordi Palet Martinez, IETF Sergeant at Arms
• Ted Ts'o, IETF Sergeant at Arms
• Dean Anderson, CEO Av8 Internet, Inc

Some messages have not been included in the table below because they do not implicate Mr. Ts'o of misconduct. . These messages will be summarized in another section.

Significant Messages Showing Misconduct

This table summarizes the key messages that show the misconduct of Mr. Ts'o All dates are in 2005 unless otherwise indicated.

Activities by IETF Chair Brian Carpenter