ITU: Not Even Good At Not Being Transparent, Accidentally Releases Deep Packet Inspection Standard

from the look-at-that dept

Earlier this week, we wrote about how the ITU had secretly approved a standard for deep packet inspection behind closed doors. This was troubling on a number of different levels, including the idea that they’re even trying to standardize such a thing, and that they’re doing so in secret. However, after the news came out, Asher Wolf decided to tweet a simple question, asking if anyone had access to documents about the DPI standard. And a funny thing happened:

Toby Johnson, a PR/communications guy for the ITU, responded and offered to send the documents. Which he did. And then, five hours later, after Asher had spoken about them publicly and sent them around to a bunch of journalists, she got an email saying that the documents were for her eyes only, and not to publish or share them “in part or in whole.”

Yes, the ITU is so incompetent that they can’t even do secrecy right.

Richard Chirgwin has a pretty good rundown on how ridiculous the DPI standard is, but perhaps more bizarre, as Wolf points out, the documents show that the ITU didn’t think it was worth studying the impact of such a standard before implementing one — which would suggest (yet again) that the ITU appears to go about things backwards.

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Comments on “ITU: Not Even Good At Not Being Transparent, Accidentally Releases Deep Packet Inspection Standard”

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24 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

considering the country (USA)that started all this ‘negotiating in secret’ over almost anything the would cause severe backlash from the public, the ones that would be impacted the most whilst giving them the least, if any, option of saying anything, how can there be any condemnation that people will believe? had they not have started it, things would perhaps, not be as bad as they are now! let’s face it, everyone is at it!

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: So.

I was thinking the same thing. Except I can’t believe such a thing could occur for the exact reasons that you’ve cited.
If we’re concerned about closed door meetings and censorship, I cannot take something as that so seriously.

Yes I feel as if I may be the ass chasing the carrot in so many cartoons, but I really can’t believe this was an honest occurrence.

Anonymous Coward says:

This does not come as any great surprise. Let’s face it, due to the way government in general (although there are department/agencies that are exceptions) are several years behind cutting edge in both knowledge and technology. That being said, most people who are cutting edge, and know/have the current tech often have very little to do with governing bodies.

For the most part, any “solutions” these entities come up with are largely already irrelevant, because they have already been bypassed, but that information simply hasn’t trickled down to the level of the average user yet (but they will have by the time these “standards” and “solutions” have been approved and fully implemented).

out_of_the_blue says:

OR, at least the following possibities:

) A carefully chosen “leak” to divert in many ways.
) False; perhaps excessive so when real terms are out, breath sigh of relief.
) Gives specifics to chatter over, likely better than dark musings: “this isn’t so bad”; “what’s this mean?”; “whoa, look at this!” and so on.
) [My favorite, already been predicted above but I’ll witticize it:] Doesn’t actually mean anything, they’ll stick a gun in your face and do whatever they want: “Standards? Ah, we don’t need no stinking standards.”

Josh Gibson (profile) says:

Re: Re:

I was thinking the same thing.I can’t believe such a thing could occur for the exact reasons that a previous poster cited.
If we’re concerned about closed door meetings and censorship, I cannot take something as that so seriously.

Yes I feel as if I may be the ass chasing the carrot in so many cartoons, but I really can’t believe this was an honest mistake. This was intentional.

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