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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/6/22 9:39 AM, Dev Anand
Teelucksingh via At-Large wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CAKcdk9M1cQeQksn3a4Ysy2_aBLWneXLE2T5cUD5QmWeLgzzq9w@mail.gmail.com">
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<p><span class="gmail-ng-star-inserted">ICANN Blog :
Relying on ICANN Community-Developed Processes for a
Safe, Secure Internet</span></p>
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<p>In our race to be safe and secure we are forgetting about
maintenance, monitoring, diagnostics, and repair.</p>
<p>Our layers of security are making it harder to keep the net
running.</p>
<p>I've been working on the monitor/diagnose/repair side of things
for more than 4 decades. I've watched as the number and strength
of security walls being erected, walls that make running the net
hard, is increasing.</p>
<p>Yes, we need security. But we also need means to keep the net
running and to fix it when thing go awry.</p>
<p>Few have been willing to discuss this trade-off between security
and maintenance/repair.</p>
<p>The solution may require empowerment of people with special
privileges and use of privileged tools of exceptional power; a
cadre of privileged internet priests.</p>
<p>The creation of such a cadre has been strongly resisted when that
cadre has taken the form of things like backdoors into
cryptography. However, to keep the net alive sometimes people and
tools are going to have to go into the cellars and sewers of the
net where unpleasant and uncomfortable things will be seen. To my
mind this all comes down to ethics and trust, the trust that those
who have special powers to maintain the net operate within a set
of ethical guidelines backed by strong enforcement.<br>
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<p>At the present time the internet is like a patent on a surgical
table. Perhaps the patient is sick, perhaps not, perhaps in need
of immediate care. But on our present internet the doctors are
locked outside the building and the the surgeon is allowed only
butter knives rather than sharp scalpels.</p>
<p>The internet has become a lifeline utility - health, safety, and
even lives depend on it. That will increase in the future.</p>
<p>Yet we have only weak and filtered means to monitor the net, to
understand its pathologies; to even know when things are working
badly (whether due to failure, attack, or simple
mis-configuration) are, at best, weak; and to make repairs.</p>
<p>Questions of security must be considered, hand-in-hand, with
matters of the necessary access and the sharp, potentially
dangerous, tools that must be wielded to keep thins operating
well.</p>
<p> --karl--</p>
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