Posted on 09/15/2013 6:29:23 PM PDT by Bobalu
Take Back the Internet
Government and industry have betrayed the Internet, and us.
By subverting the Internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our Internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical Internet stewards.
This is not the Internet the world needs, or the Internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.
And by we, I mean the engineering community.
Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.
But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can -- and should -- do.
One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don't cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.
We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the Internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I've just started collecting. I want 50. There's safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.
Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the Internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.
We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems -- these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the Internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs to dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.
Three, we can influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the Internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the Internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of Internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.
Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country's Internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can't be dominated or abused by any one country.
Generations from now, when people look back on these early decades of the Internet, I hope they will not be disappointed in us. We can ensure that they don't only if each of us makes this a priority, and engages in the debate. We have a moral duty to do this, and we have no time to lose.
Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we're going to be breaking new ground.
Again, the politics of this is a bigger task than the engineering, but the engineering is critical. We need to demand that real technologists be involved in any key government decision making on these issues. We've had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy.
To the engineers, I say this: we built the Internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it.
Why rebuild the damn thing? What we SHOULD be doing is going to war with these people and taking back what is rightfully ours to begin with.
We pay for the damn thing and we allow these government thugs to treat us like criminals? We should be dragging their asses out into the streets and hanging them from lamp posts.
We can continue to be slaves or we can cowboy up and kick some ass.
The Internet was originally built by DARPA for the Dept of Defense.i.e It was built by the Government for the Government.
We the people are the only funding source for the government. WE built the internet.
i.e. “government of the people, by the people, for the people.””
The only way to get the Gov to behave is to defund it but it would take a massive amount of people not paying their taxes. Now that I think about 0’s economic policies have been do horrible and do many people have had their hours cut, lost their jobs or losed their small businesses they’ve probably done it to themselves.
is it possible to have the computer’s OS to be hardwired?
why does every program on the internet have
access to my harddrive?
whatever happened to HDs that were ‘read-only’?
what happened to linux?
I presently have windows Vista Home Basic
as my OS.
why is it any better than Win95?
I don’t want automatic updates
The only way to get the Gov to behave is to defund it but it would take a massive amount of people not paying their taxes. Now that I think about 0’s economic policies have been so horrible and so many people have had their hours cut, lost their jobs or losed their small businesses they’ve probably done it to themselves.
Schneier??
He’s a pompous ass who likes to smell his own farts!!
Sort of, do what I do and reload the op system from an image at each start up.
whatever happened to HDs that were ‘read-only’?
That sounds like a DVD to me :-)
what happened to linux?
It's still here. Try Zorin for an easy transition from Windows
I presently have windows Vista Home Basic as my OS. why is it any better than Win95?
Vista is pretty bad, XP and Win7 are better.
I don’t want automatic updates
Just turn them off.
Perhaps, but he is also a genius.
Here is another guy who presents useful info about internet security.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TWiTSecurityNow/videos
Perhaps he does, I wouldn't know.
I DO know that he's brilliant, he's correct (technically), he's right (ethically), he works hard, and he can motivate people.
So I'm sorry you don't like him, but he's far and away the best we've got.
Unless you want to propose somebody else?
Stallman is brilliant and I make use of his creations every day at work and at home. He has my respect and gratitude for all the stuff he did with GNU and the GPL.
Unfortunately he's a fanatical nutcase in some respects, a little too much on the doctrinaire side, to let him "control the internet".
However, he should certainly be one of the handful of genius-level folks who make policy.
You can't run Windows (regular consumer versions) from a read-only disk, whether HD or DVD. You CAN run certain specialized versions of Windows from a DVD, for example recovery disks, but they're not what you want for regular daily use unless for some overriding reason you are willing to forego a TON of functionality.
Reloading the OS from an image on every boot is good. So is "DeepFreeze" and similar products which snapshot the system and reload from the snapshot on every reboot. The advantage of the latter approach is that desired changes (application or OS updates, bug fixes, changing settings) is much quicker than making an entire new image of the system disk.
If you set Automatic Updates "OFF", make sure you go back and check it from time to time after you do updates manually. Sometimes Microsoft likes to change the settings under the hood. Surprise!
Updates can be done manually, and should be done for security reasons. If you avoid updates completely for some overriding reason, make sure your computer is not connected directly to the internet -- EVER, FOR ANY REASON. If/when you do have to access the internet, do so through a good hardware firewall that blocks all incoming access except the things you explicitly allow. And be prepared for some really awful restrictions on what you can and can't do.
Stallman is a historic figure whose contributions are on the order of Voltaire or Locke. However his eccentricity is legendary. We went out on a picnic with him once, even my daughter, who was 3 at the time, still remembers him as "a very weird man". He said he couldn't go swimming, just wading. He was afraid to put his head under water because he might "forget how to breathe". Otherwise we had a grand time, still remembered fondly.
Whatever.
But his security blog is the best. Light-years ahead of yours.
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