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Re: Amendment to Proposed GR: Declassifying parts of -private of historical interest



* Micha Lenk <micha@debian.org> [2016-08-07 12:59:05 +0200]:

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> Hi all,
> 
> sorry for joining the discussion late. I just realized when reading
> the call for votes that I should have joined the discussion earlier.

Definitely.

> Am 16.07.2016 um 23:06 schrieb Julien Cristau:
> > On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 13:17:24 -0700, Don Armstrong wrote:
> > 
> >> 2. Debian listmasters and/or other individuals delegated by the
> >> DPL to do so are authorized to declassify excerpts of -private of
> >> historical interest by any process which provides sufficient
> >> opportunity for Debian Developers to object by GR prior to
> >> declassification.
> >> 
> > I'm not sure I like restricting the opportunity to object to
> > Debian Developers.  Anything of historical interest is likely to
> > involve people who are no longer DDs at the time publication is
> > considered, and they should probably have a say.
> 
> What I am missing in this section is a clarification whether this
> affects also past messages to -private or only those messages after
> this GR has passed and the change is reflected in all the
> documentation and is properly announced to all DDs.
> 
> While I am fine with the latter, I oppose this GR affecting any
> messages that have been sent in the past. That would establishing some
> kind of "ex post facto" law (which by the way is prohibited in many
> constitutions for good reasons). I really don't want to leave the
> decision whether past messages will be affected or not up to the list
> masters. For this reason I will vote "Further Discussion".

In my opinion the only point in this General Resolution is allowing the
declassification of the early years of -private, where the mailing list was
used as a "project" mailing list rather than for discussing actually sensitive
matters. I find that we've gotten better at moving threads of interest to public
forums over time.

I expect a sensible declassification process to allow the original authors to
decide on whether their messages should be declassified or not, if an explicit
disclaimer has not been put in the message.

I also expect the declassification team to present and hash out the process in
public before going forward with it, but without having the burden of doing a
GR for every little tweak they do.

The old GR mandated a process so contrived that the only thing it achieved was
discouraging anyone from ever implementing it, while also barring people from
ever extracting the really interesting content. I trust the listmasters or
their chosen declassification team to come up with a workable process of their
liking, and to apply good judgement in unraveling historically interesting
threads while upholding the privacy of what needs to be kept private.

Cheers,
-- 
Nicolas Dandrimont

BOFH excuse #125:
we just switched to Sprint.

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