A Letter to You from Our Chief Instigator
Dear Visitor to the WTSA Site,
Thank you for your interest in the World Trust
Signatories Association.
As one of the five Individual Experts in the High Level Experts Group
of the ITU's Global Cybersecurity Agenda, I have had the pleasure of
collaborating with some of the most talented people in the world of
information security. The insights they offered at our recent meeting
at ITU headquarters in Geneva were important and valuable.
And yet...
Because the charter and culture of the International
Telecommunication Union is all about consensus, I fear that an
abundance of insights and good intentions is
not going to win this struggle against the criminals and predators who
have turned the world's information infrastructure into a huge outdoor favela.
If the Internet has brought about a global village, this village
is a sad slum
where we desperately guard our wallets and our children, expecting the
worst and frequently
getting it.
We believe we have the solution. And we ask that you suspend judgment
on this admittedly audacious claim long enough to examine it.
Our solution consists of a twelve-part set of methods and procedures
and standards that are adopted, mostly intact, from the worlds of
certification and real estate. While its originators, Hamadoun
Touré
and Alexander Ntoko, had named the initiative, my writing a
book about it required that I give a name to that which was being
initiated. I came up with the Quiet
Enjoyment Infrastructure. (Drs. Touré and
Ntoko must have liked it, as the meeting they hosted at ITU
headquarters on March 7, 2005 was called the Quiet Enjoyment
Infrastructure Meeting.)
The World e-Trust Initiative and the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure
surely benefitted from a rare opportunity to initiate something big at
the
ITU without the burden of gaining the consensus of most of the world's
nations and its sector member organizations. Then,
a year
ago, the membership of the ITU recognized Dr. Touré's
extraordinary talents and
leadership qualities by electing him Secretary General.
Dr. Touré's newfound authority would at first appear to give
our
initiative a big boost. But now he represents the entire ITU, in all
its consensus-driven-ness. Now all voices must be heard before action
is
taken. As the recent Global Cybersecurity Agenda meeting reminded me,
there are lots and lots of voices. And certainly more than one agenda.
Missing from those voices are voices of individuals. Not official
delegates of telecommunications ministries, NGOs and other sector
member organizations, but ordinary individuals like you and me. (Well,
OK, I work for an ITU sector member organization and WTSA sponsor but
here I
speak for myself and my family.)
Please take a good look at the World e-Trust Initiative / Quiet
Enjoyment Infrastructure. Challenge its assumptions and assertions. If
it passes your tests and if you agree that it deserves
the support of the one organization in the world that legitimately has
the duly constituted public authority to apply standards in the same
manner that your city's
buildings department applies building codes, then please sign our
Memorandum of Support.
We think the leadership of the ITU will be delighted and encouraged to
learn that everyday users of the Internet think that in this situation
bold initiatives based upon sound designs and detailed plans should
trump endless years of meetings.
Sincerely,
Wes Kussmaul
Parent of Young Internet Users
The Memorandum of Support
To Drs. Hamadoun Touré and
Alexander Ntoko
We who have signed this Memorandum of Support have read the
International Telecommunication Union's
World e-Trust Memorandum of Understanding
"the MoU". We
are individuals
and thus are not eligible to become signatories to the MoU.
Notwithstanding that ineligibility, we are in support of the objectives
and methods described the MoU.
We understand that the Charter of the International Telecommunication
Union specifies that its actions be governed by the consensus of its
members. We further understand
that the ITU's Global Cybersecurity Agenda, its Botnet Mitigation
initiative, and other efforts to reduce fraud, predation, crime and the
spread of malware via the Internet
must be managed in accordance with the ITU Charter.
However, we feel that the increasing incidence of such online fraud,
predation, crime and spread of malware calls for decisive action by the
ITU's leadership. We believe
that it is the intent of the ITU's leadership to produce and implement
plans to mitigate these problems as quickly as possible. Hereby we the
Signatories to the World Trust Memorandum of Support go on record as
encouraging the leadership of the ITU to proceed with all due speed
and decisiveness in solving the problems of fraud, predation, crime,
invasion of privacy and
the spread of malware on the Internet.
Sincerely,
Click here to sign
The Signatories
