[Cryptography] NSA voting on TLS encryption at the IETF TLS WG

[Paul Wouters]

On Wed, 8 Jul 2026, Andrew Lee wrote:

> You shared badly misinformed information about the IETF and how it works. And you keep doing it, not understanding how IETF works, when there are multiple
> Last Calls to resolve disagreements and instead attribute it to malice.
>
>             I think the phrase I’ve been pulling from the IAB’s message is that you “did not accurately describe the record,” Paul.

At this point, due to the misleading quoting, the IAB send out a message
to clarify the situation:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/6wWaqTUY7eaXkkNldo9RTjXOwIY

 	The IAB notes that its response
 	<https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/iab/appeals/artifact/310> to Daniel
 	J.  Bernstein’s 2026-04-24 appeal
 	<https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/iab/appeals/artifact/272> is being
 	cited in ongoing working group discussion. To prevent that response from
 	being read more broadly than intended, the IAB offers the clarification
 	below. It takes no position on any other matter now before the WG, its
 	chairs, or the IESG.

 	The IAB denied the appeal. It did not find that the chairs' determination
 	of rough consensus to adopt fell outside the discretion that RFC 2418
 	affords them, nor that the responsible AD and the IESG acted outside their
 	process role in declining to overturn that determination.

 	The relevant observation regarding the responsible AD was narrow. The IAB
 	noted that the initial characterization of the adoption call by the
 	responsible AD did not accurately describe the record, and that a more
 	precise account followed. It was offered as encouragement to chairs and ADs
 	to take care when summarizing participant responses. The observation
 	concerned the accuracy of that account, not the intent behind it. It was
 	not a finding that the responsible AD acted in bad faith, engaged in
 	misconduct, or breached the IETF’s conduct norms.

 	The IAB has also seen its response read as reaching conclusions it did not
 	state. The IAB did not determine that consensus to adopt was absent, nor
 	did it overturn any consensus call. Its response should not be read as
 	reaching conclusions on matters beyond the appeal, including the subsequent
 	working group last call or the fact that a different Area Director became
 	responsible for the working group.

> I quoted the text, word for word. To be clear, what you pasted absolutely matches my understanding of it, wherein a record was not described accurately, and
> therefore, it was subsequently corrected.

Hopefully, this fixes Andrew's understanding.

Paul