Hi Filippo,

I don’t appreciate your labeling any vote in opposition to this draft that came after Dr. Bernstein’s post as “being consistent with an external influence campaign”.

I had no idea regarding Dr. Bernstein’s post when I expressed my own opposition to this draft, and you’re not the arbiter of how people communicate their technical opinions. I’m sure that you yourself as well as many others have advertised your views on this draft across many online channels, both public and private, and that’s your right as well as it is mine. And yet somehow you’re the only one who won’t stop trying to police and tar-and-feather people that you simply disagree with.

So far in the past few weeks alone, you’ve employed a bevy of manipulative tactics to try to bully people that you disagree with into essentially not expressing themselves:

1. You wrote a deeply condescending email to Muhammad in which you made false equivalences between his email’s word counts and then asked him to essentially stop emailing the list. I had to write a detailed response showing how your “analysis” was pointless and misleading: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/vu8y2k2cdht2E0ivyvHSwXTYSho/

2. You’re now again engaging in deceptive rhetoric against people you disagree with on this draft, saying that five dissensions against it are necessarily tied to an “external influence campaign”. Where did you see that, in your crystal ball?

If you believe that you have the omniscience to judge Dr. Bernstein’s _expression_ of his views as a premeditated external influence campaign and think that you need to bring it to the WG’s attention, then I think it’s important for your years of bad faith rhetoric to be disclosed on the record. Prior to these recent attempts to silence and intimidate people you disagree with, you’ve publicly called Dr. Bernstein, the person you’re currently accusing of leading an “influence campaign” a “washed up scientist”. You’ve even gone so far as to criticize Tania Lange simply by virtue of her being Bernstein’s partner, something which you retracted once people pointed out to you that it was sexist: https://x.com/filosottile/status/1556659861387091973?s=46

I really wish that we could just cast our votes without your constant attempts to link people to your latest pet conspiracy theory or disparage them simply because they disagree with you. Some people want to focus on the technical details, and your repeated obvious bad faith arguments are making that difficult.

Do you ever look in the mirror?

Nadim Kobeissi
Symbolic Software • https://symbolic.software

On 28 Jun 2026, at 8:46 PM, Filippo Valsorda <[email protected]> wrote:


2026-06-28 20:18 GMT+02:00 Kevin Milner <[email protected]>:
On 28 Jun 2026, at 14:01, D. J. Bernstein <[email protected]> wrote:
no In-Reply-To header (which is slightly annoying to produce when one
was not a participant in the list previously).

Did you complain about the lack of an In-Reply-To header field in
multiple messages that have already shown up _supporting_ the document,
such as the message from NSA's Mike Jenkins?
[…]
But there's also a much more basic point here about fairness. How can it
be okay for new TLS participants to support the spec, and not okay for
new TLS participants to oppose the spec?

I assume you mean my email, given that (from a quick skim, admittedly) I’m the only other new TLS participant in support. And I agree with Filippo: frankly, my opinion should probably be less weighted on this matter!

Indeed. (As much as I personally like you, Kevin!)

I'm not the In-Reply-To police, I was linked to what amounts to an external influence campaign, so I made sure the WG was aware of it and correlated it to the three (now five) most recent emails that are consistent with it.

Not sure how "the degree to which individuals have participated in the WG in the past should be part of how their opinion is weighted into calling the consensus of the WG" could be interpreted in good faith to refer only to opposing opinions.
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