Papers on the history of interactions between the IETF and governments' policies

Cryptography:

• IAB and IESG, RFC 1984, IAB and IESG Statement on Cryptographic Technology and the Internet, August 1996.
  "The IAB and IESG would like to encourage policies that allow ready access to uniform strong cryptographic technology for all Internet users in all countries."

Wiretapping:

• IESG, [Raven] The IETF's position on technology to support legal intercept, October 11, 1999. Email to the raven mailing list.
  "The wiretap question has come up in one of these working groups, but the IESG has concluded that the general questions should be discussed, and conclusions reached, by the entire IETF, not just one WG."

• Declan McCullagh, Thumbs Down on Net Wiretaps, WIRED, February 3, 2000.
  "It took four months, a grim debate, and thousands of mailing list messages, but the group that sets Internet standards has decided not to support wiretapping."
  Earlier reports from October 1999, November 9, 1999, and November 11, 1999.

• IAB and IESG, RFC 2804, IETF Policy on Wiretapping, May 2000.
  "The IETF has decided not to consider requirements for wiretapping as part of the process for creating and maintaining IETF standards."

Internet Emergency Preparedness:

• The charter of the Internet Emergency Preparedness (ieprep) Working Group in the IETF.
  "The Internet community needs to consider how it can best support emergency management and recovery operations."

Related topics that might not directly involve the IETF:

Controlling traffic at country boundaries:

• Declan McCullagh, Panama requires ISPs to block Internet telephony, November 4, 2002. Email to the politech mailing list.
  "In an apparent attempt to stem telephone company revenue losses due to Internet telephony, the government of Panama has decreed that 24 UDP ports be blocked by all Internet service providers."
  Update: Panama's supreme court suspended this decree on November 27, 2002.

• Business Week online, Panama cracks down on Net telephony, November 25, 2002.
  "The Panamanian government has ordered local Internet service providers to take steps aimed at blocking Internet telephone traffic that passes through the country."
  "Panama is one of dozens of countries that ban VoIP services."

• G. Pascal Zachary, Searching for a Dial Tone in Africa, New York Times, July 5, 2003.
  "In parts of Africa the Internet is serving as a powerful force for change, primarily by allowing companies and individuals to make international telephone calls far less expensively than through conventional channels."

• Josepf Kahn, China Has World's Tightest Internet Censorship, Study Finds, New York Times, December 4, 2002.
  "China has the most extensive Internet censorship in the world, regularly denying local users access to 19,000 Web sites that the government deems threatening, a study by Harvard Law School researchers finds."
  "The study offers fresh evidence that the Internet may be proving easier to control than older forms of communication like telephones, facsimile machines or even letters."

• Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, Documentation of Internet Filtering Worldwide, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School.
  "With this project we seek to document and analyze a large number of Web pages blocked by various types of filtering regimes, and ultimately create a distributed tool enabling Internet users worldwide to gather and relay such data from their respective locations on the Internet."

• Poor Connections: Trouble on the Internet frontiers, Rand Review, December 2002.
  "Numerous obstacles keep the information revolution from spreading unfettered to the furthest reaches of the globe. RAND researchers have looked at four regions where the "information superhighway" has hit roadblocks: China, Russia, Latin America, and parts of the Middle East."

Anonymity:

• John Markoff, Agency Weighed, but Discarded, Plan Reconfiguring the Internet, New York Times, November 22, 2002.
  "The Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible."

Security:

• United States, The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, A National Strategy to Secure Cyperspace, September 2002.

• John Markoff and John Schwartz, Bush Administration to Propose System for Monitoring Internet, December 20, 2002, New York Times.
  "The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users."

• John Markoff and John Schwartz, Many Tools of Big Brother Are Up and Running, December 23, 2002, New York Times.
  "In the Pentagon research effort to detect terrorism by electronically monitoring the civilian population, the most remarkable detail may be this: Most of the pieces of the system are already in place... It is XML, a refinement of the Internet's original World Wide Web scheme, that has made it possible to consider welding thousands of databases together without centralizing the information."

• William Jackson, U.S. should fund R&D for secure Internet protocols, Clarke says, Government Computer News, October 31, 2002.
  "Presidential cybersecurity advisor Richard Clarke today renewed his call for government funding to support R&D for more secure Internet protocols. Clarke told reporters that security and reliability of the basic protocols underlying the Internet have not received enough attention because no one has a proprietary interest in them."

• Maureen Sirhal, Security department may oversee Internet infrastructure, April 1, 2003.
  " The Homeland Security Department may take more of a direct role coordinating the security of the Internet's infrastructure, a top administration official said Tuesday."

Internet Research:

• Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research, CSTB publication, 1999.
  "Funding a Revolution examines the history of computing since World War II to elucidate the [U.S.] federal government's role in funding computing research. It ... summarizes key historical advances in which government-sponsored research played an important role."
  From Chapter 7 on "Development of the Internet and the World Wide Web": "The development of the Internet demonstrates that federal support for research, applied at the right place and right time, can be extremely effective."