[bestbits] Best Bits MAG nominations for your approval - URGENT

[michael gurstein]

We've now spent 3 or 4 days discussing/avoiding legitimizing the leadership
structure for BB which is, I would guess, more than enough time for the
current leadership to have gone through a reasonable if accelerated
transparent selection/legitimization process.  This along with your
statement that the reason for this is the "very important processes that are
rolling along", I must say leads inevitably to even more suspicion and
unease as to possible underlying motives for this evident lack of will in
this direction etc. etc.

 

The fact that the entire self-appointed Steering Committee appears to be
part of an as yet invisible nom-com for selecting for example, the CS rep.
to the HLP makes one even more uneasy.

 

What Snowden did which is of immediate relevance is to indicate how
significant the Internet is seen by the emergent Surveillance State. As I
discussed quite extensively in a blogpost
<http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/the-open-internet-society-and-its-
enemies-can-multistakeholderism-survive-information-dominance/>  it would be
astonishing if the security apparatus would be systematically looking for
vulnerabilities and ways of subverting Internet processes in global
governments, the private sector and the technical community and would bypass
activities such as those such ours in Civil Society that potentially go to
the heart of the Internet through its potentially emergent structures of
governance as we are currently discussing.

 

As Ronald Reagan famously said "trust but verify".

 

M

 

From: Jeremy Malcolm [mailto:jeremy at ciroap.org] 
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 12:24 AM
To: michael gurstein; bestbits at lists.bestbits.net&g
Subject: Re: [bestbits] Best Bits MAG nominations for your approval - URGENT

 

On 20 Nov 2013, at 10:59 pm, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:





Unfortunately in the post-Snowden world "trust us" is not a sufficient
answer-only transparency and accountability are.

 

As long as the Steering Committee is self-appointed through murky procedures
and as long as this self-appointed (Interim or no) Steering Committee
chooses to act (and present itself to the world) as though it has a mandate
to act on behalf of the BB grouping whatever that might be, there will
necessarily and quite reasonably be a lack of trust and questions as to
legitimacy.

 

Actually the only such questions are coming from within; we are undermining
ourselves, and to my mind unnecessarily so.  Snowden did not tar civil
society with the same brush as the NSA.  We have presented an interim
procedure for democratising the steering committee in Bali, which remains
open for discussion and will be implemented soon once finalised, but to rush
its finalisation now at a time when leadership is required would be
pointless and would simply remove us from some very important processes that
are rolling along with or without us.

 

-- 



Dr Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Policy Officer
Consumers International | the global campaigning voice for consumers
Office for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East
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