Minutes/National Council/2020-05-12

National Council meeting May 12th 2020

Scheduled start 20:30 Sydney time

Quorum: not quite

Attendance

 * David "twisty" Read (Councillor)
 * Alex Jago (Secretary)
 * Miles Whiticker (President)
 * Dave "Satch" Kennedy (Councillor)


 * Bryn "mandrke" Busai (Dispute Resolution Committee)
 * John August (Deputy President emeritus)


 * Geoff Huntley (covidsafe.watch)

Previous Minutes

 * https://pirateparty.org.au/wiki/Minutes/National_Council/2020-04-28


 * covidsafe.watch site
 * Email discussion prior to meeting:
 * per Miles: "We have been invited to take over running covidsafe.watch"
 * Brandon: "I'm concerned as to the liability issues and neutrality issues. We take this on, it may taint the project in some commentators eyes."
 * John: What about EFA? Why not them?
 * Presentation from Geoff Huntley
 * Geoff wants to think about succession very early
 * "we started looking at COVIDSafe source code very early, we have a community and we are keeping track"
 * "now we're watching a government department fail"
 * no bug bounty, slow responses
 * website documenting failures
 * need to just be able to link to URLs of CVE-likes
 * a single person can be character assassinated and is fallible
 * next chapter: team of good software engineers, DIY app
 * Labor is taking notice!
 * Example failure: temp ID isn't temporary, not rotating. Perma-broadcast, including handset name. Full deanonymisation.
 * SG fixed this in one day
 * auto decompilation being worked on, bypassing the BS "license"
 * this work is primary research
 * plenty of countries around the world
 * conjecture: possibly Australia is limited to only putting the app on the AU app store
 * likely that AU has done a separately licensed fork, probably just a tarball drop
 * conjecture #2: because OpenTrace is GPL, it's possible that AU can't take the patches
 * Alex: what are you actually after?
 * Geoff: need active maintainers over the longer-than-a-couple-of-months timeframe
 * Repository
 * Keeping it factual
 * Discord
 * Keeping it from degenerating

Potential PPAU actions

 * 1) do nothing
 * 2) publicly take over (for various values of take over)
 * 3) quietly help in the background
 * 4) Make EFA or DRW do it (basically the same as #0)

Other Covid points

 * History shows that temporary civil restrictions are released once the threat has been dealt with. Too soon often.

Congress

 * NB: 42 days notice required
 * https://pirateparty.org.au/constitution/#part-iii-6.1(3)
 * General NC support for the last possible date
 * Satch: Oyster just isn't production ready
 * To be put to email vote: that Congress be held on the last weekend in July