Hey all, Some of you know me. For those of you who don't, I'm James Vasile, and at OpenITP the buck stops with me. So whatever your complaints about our work in Tunis, I'm the right person to yell at. First of all, everybody on the OpenITP team agreed that the real names policy was terrible. The policy was layered on by USAID as a condition of InformSec bringing in a group of Syrian activists who had specific security concerns (and they'd had a recent security breach that was causing people to freak out a little). From the beginning, we regretted it and have been saying internally that we wouldn't ever put oursevles in a position to have to request real names again. Our intent was not to bar pseudononymous people. We had several pseudononymous participants, albeit all people several members of my team had experience with. Rather, we were trying to get a handle on who was there and how much separation we were going to have to build in for our Syrian contingent if their comfort demanded it. In the end, we limited the real names policy as much as we could and then decided we didn't want to choose between the CryptoParty and Syrian guests. In retrospect, we should have just made the hard choice then and not tried to combine a CryptoParty with people who had elevated security concerns. So, yeah, the policy was a mistake. I thought it was a crappy tradeoff but that the value of getting all those people in a room would make it worthwhile. I figured some people would avoid the event because of it, but my hope was the enough people would want to have the conversation that the compromise would end up being a footnote. Instead, people (most especially the local Tunisian community we had been really excited to meet) took exception to the policy and we had zero outside participation in the CryptoParty. That really made me unhappy, and it underscored how big a mistake the policy had been. Just to be clear: We checked no IDs. We gave no list of names of CryptoParty attendees to USAID. We had several people participating under pseudonyms, and we reached a comfort level that allowed everybody to mix freely by the end of the event. So that's what happened. I'm really sorry we made the wrong policy choice. And I'm really sorry we did a shit job at explaining it. I'll try hard not let it happen again. OpenITP will be hosting a meetup in NY on December 17. If anybody wants to come by and talk about it, I'm game. No real names required. Peace, James -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE