As that shows, this is a high-level technical specification; it‘s not about how to mitigate pervasive monitoring, but about the fact that Internet engineers should always think about how to mitigate such surveillance when they are drawing up IETF specifications. It‘s great that the IETF is starting to work along these lines, even if it is a rather melancholy acknowledgement that we now live in a world where the default assumption has to be that someone, somewhere, is trying to monitor on a massive scale what people are doing.

One of the (many) shocking revelations from the Snowden leaks is that the NSA and GCHQ use „man-in-the-middle“ (MITM) attacks to impersonate Internet services like Google, to spy on encrypted communications. So you might think that nobody would want to touch this tainted technology with a barge-pole. But as Lauren Weinstein points out in an interesting post, the authors of an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) Internet Draft, „Explicit Trusted Proxy in HTTP/2.0,“ are proposing not just to use MITMs, but also to formalize their use.