
Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is - teawithcarl
http://m.guardiannews.com/technology/2013/jul/28/edward-snowden-death-of-internet
======
peterkelly
If anything, I think this should be a wakeup call for those of us who have the
capability to change things. I'm not talking about lobbying or raising
attention to the issue, but the technical challenges of designing a network
that is immune to all forms of surveillance. Let's treat this as an issue of
computer science, not politics.

Now I'm not claiming that this will be easy (and it may not even be possible),
but this whole episode has made me seriously reconsider my long-term career
direction in terms of the type of research I want to be doing. Pioneers like
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn created the "Internet 1" so to speak, and everything
since then has been building on that. There's been plenty of projects that
have worked towards getting around these surveillance measures (Tor for
example), and I think we need more things like this.

We need to fundamentally rethink the design of the Internet, because the
current design is broken. Just like TCP/IP provides the infrastructure to
abstract over different networking technologies and physical links (and the
failure/slowness of individual links), we need something that abstracts over
the basic, unencrypted (or encrypted but subject to centralised sabotage, like
SSL) communication layer. Something that third parties _can 't_ intercept, at
least not with anything like the ease with which they do today. It never
ceases to amaze me, for example, that email is still unencrypted by default,
and we don't have public-key cryptography built in to every mail client and
turned on by default.

Most importantly, we need more distribution, and to stop relying on
centralised service providers, who are necessarily subject to the laws of the
country in which they operate (see: recent articles discussing impacts of the
issue on US cloud firms operating in foreign markets). Facebook should be a
protocol, not a service. Twitter should be a protocol, not a service. And so
forth. This of course completely upends the business model these technologies
are based on, and would need to be approached by people with a completely
different perspective.

I certainly don't have the answers to these questions. But it's made me
curious and it's something I'll be giving a great deal of thought to in the
coming years.

As Albert Einstein once said: "We can not solve our problems with the same
level of thinking that created them".

~~~
jaekwon
The internet, which largely runs on IP and extended by NAT, appears to have
been constructed poorly in terms of privacy. There are protocols like
ICE/STUN/TURN (which is what WebRTC is built on) that supposedly try to bridge
the gap to enable true P2P connectivity, but I believe even ICE appears
limited in that it doesn't actually solve the hairpin problem, where two peers
are behind multiple levels of NAT routers. I'm still investigating this issue,
so correct me if I'm wrong.

What we need are better routing systems. Take a look at CJDNS which has a
novel routing protocol. I don't know what the scaling limitations there are,
there doesn't appear to be documentation on empirical or theoretical
performance guarantees; but it's a start, and there's a growing community
behind it.

With ever-cheaper devices, it should become possible to create a new family of
router hardware that connects devices in a mesh fashion, scalable to the world
at large. It's not going to be easy to design, and it sure as hell won't be
easy to get physical adoption for (considering that the current internet is
"good enough" for most), but it's possible.

P.S. I've created a subreddit at /r/fourthtech if anybody wants to get into
deep technical discussions about various topics on better
internet/communication protocols.

~~~
woah
Is this mesh stuff really the answer? Sure, it can stop collection at a
central point, but doesn't it still leave open the possibility for any data to
be collected from spying nodes throughout the network?

~~~
jaekwon
The CJDNS whitepaper has a good writeup:

[https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/rfcs/Whitepap...](https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/rfcs/Whitepaper.md)

Node to node encryption would make packet inspection rather difficult, for
one.

BTW, I don't think CJDNS is necessarily going to win. See: [http://www.mail-
archive.com/liberationtech@lists.stanford.ed...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/liberationtech@lists.stanford.edu/msg05979.html)

But soon, somebody will to come up with a mesh protocol that is simple and
scalable.

~~~
wslh
But the problem doesn't end on encypting endpoints because the NSA can infer
information from the flow routes. You need something bigger, like honeypots
and many other tools of confusion.

------
acabal
From talking to some non-tech people about this, I have a dim view of the
possibility that Snowden's revelations will change anything on a political
level. People seem to either not care about the power the NSA has over them,
or think Snowden is a traitor that deserves death and that's enough to
invalidate anything he might have revealed. Society forgets history--
generations of born-here Americans have never lived in a totalitarian state,
and thus don't have the frame of reference to understand why the NSA's power
could lead to grave harm.

But I still do have hope, and the community at HN exemplifies it. Even if
politics and society won't change enough to prevent further spying (or, on the
scale of decades, a worse NSA-fueled catastrophe), _at least_ all the smart
techies of the world are growing aware, getting outraged, and getting
organized over what's been revealed. In many ways, our real control over
technological progress is the best we can ask for.

If you know how to program, if you're thinking about learning, if your
business depends on the internet, or if you're otherwise in a position to
create technology of any flavor: the responsibility is on you-- _on us_ \--to
shape the internet and future technology in a way that will protect humanity's
privacy and civil rights for generations to come.

~~~
ceol
_> generations of born-here Americans have never lived in a totalitarian
state, and thus don't have the frame of reference to understand why the NSA's
power could lead to grave harm._

Are you sure it's not just that the only people currently talking about this
issue are white, college-aged, middle-to-upper class American men?

And for you to whip that out, I really hope you aren't one of the born-here
Americans you talk about, because you would be just as bad as the people who
supposedly don't care: you would be appropriating the experiences of the
underprivileged to back your own, unrelated endeavor.

~~~
bobbydavid
The extreme demographic subset you described doesn't even include the audience
at HN. Surely you realize that the issue of internet privacy is talked about
by more people.

And why mustn't acabal be a "born-here American" to suggest that Americans
have never lived under a totalitarian state? That's an off topic remark
designed to call acabal's expertise into question as a means of discrediting
them without directly addressing the points they bring up.

I think acabal brings up a valid point. It's hard to whip people into action
when they're not yet having direct negative consequences, even if we can
clearly see the writing on the wall. People are resistant to change.

~~~
ceol
It's not an off topic remark, because acabal _brought it up himself_. He's the
one who talked about born-here Americans not knowing the beginnings of
totalitarian states, and if you can't see the problem with a born-here
American talking about totalitarian states without actually having experienced
it, and using it to back his argument, there really is no point in furthering
this conversation.

------
MarcScott
Nobody outside the HN community seems to care about the Summer of
Surveillance. Everyone I talk to has the same "meh" attitude. I find the lack
of concern from friends and family to be more troubling than a lack of concern
from the main stream media.

~~~
Sven7
People are ambivalent, because they have bigger problems in their lives. Like
keeping a job, paying the mortgage, wondering if their kids can ever afford
college, lack of health care coverage...the list is endless.

The conversations/articles on HN mostly reflect the tech communities own echo
chambers and biases more than anything else.

~~~
samstave
And tis should be a wakeup call; if the system was actually built correctly,
they would not have to be worrying about their next meal or paycheck!

Take all the MIC funding and redirect it into education, infra, science and
social services.

Make the world better rather than weaponizing idiocy to defend a farked up
system.

------
logical42
While I agree with the general reasoning of the author, I hesitate to agree
with its conclusion. Like most of us here on hacker news, I've been following
the Snowden/Prism/NSA stories rather religiously and, for the most part, have
been very happy with the rather overwhelming coverage here on HN.

But there have been those getting tired of the news; understandably so, the
repetitive hum of media coverage these days is enough to infuriate anyone who
has the capacity to remember stuff. The author of this article seems to be
pretty infuriated at the the public's fascination with Snowden and wants,
rather ambitiously in my opinion, the public to shift their attention to the
core of the issue.

I'm not sure if the public is capable of maintaining interest in such a
passive evil (I guess I probably don't think too highly of the public). I do
think, however, that the public is capable of fixating on the Snowden story
because it is a rather interesting story. And the longer the public stays
fixated on Snowden, the weird guy living in a Russian airport, the longer the
NSA's wrongdoings also stay in the public consciousness.

I say, keep the melodrama coming, if only to keep alive the story of injustice
to the public. The success of Snowden's whistleblowing (i.e. in terms of
tangible impact) may actually rest on it.

------
DanielBMarkham
"Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe...and the
United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security
lies"

Whoa horsey. The author is making the same mistake as he accuses the press of:
missing the story.

If you want a good repeat-after-me line, repeat after me: "this has nothing to
do with the NSA either" All intelligence agencies are either doing this or
have plans to do it -- including lots of European ones which are breaking
their own laws while doing so. That's yet another shoe that hasn't dropped.
Who knows how long it'll take for our European friends to figure it out. Might
be a while.

But the larger point is valid: the internet as a conduit between a person and
the larger world is a cesspool of corporate and government eavesdroppers.
We're not operating the net: the net is monitoring our thoughts and recording
them for others to inspect at their leisure. This is not a good thing.

So the story isn't Snowden, and it's not the NSA either. It's what has become
of the dream that was the internet, and the question of whether anybody is
left that cares enough about privacy and anonymity to do something about it.

~~~
adestefan
You do realize that "the dream that was the internet" was so governments could
maybe still communicate after they blasted each other back to the stone age?

~~~
fsck--off
From a footnote (#5) on "Brief History of the Internet":

    
    
      "It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started   
      claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building 
      a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the 
      ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered
      nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize 
      robustness and survivability, including the capability to 
      withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks."
    

[http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-
internet/histor...](http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-
internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet)

------
D9u
(from the article) _US government should have turned surveillance into a huge,
privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors
such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance
to thousands of people who shouldn 't have it_

That part there really illustrates the corporate fascism which has permeated
the US government.

Who's to say that some analyst working for a private corporation isn't selling
our stolen information to some nefarious third-party for whatever reasons?

The idea that any "oversight" would preclude the above scenario is about as
believable as the insistence by "high level" government appointees claiming
that the NSA doesn't "wittingly" collect data from American's communications.

------
datalus
What concerns me the most about all of this is that it puts us on a slippery
slope. If always on surveillance becomes the norm for people to just take as a
fact of life, then it just gets worse from there. I have a couple friends who
run a startup and have told me they have given up the fact that privacy is an
illusion/out moded when discussing this with them. So if being recorded all
the time is the new norm and letting those outside of your own self connect
data points about you is okay... where does that lead? That's what I'm really
worried about.

It spells out my worst fear of later generations of digital natives will
actually live in a world best described as Orwellian or even post Orwellian...
even more ridiculously pervasive. They wouldn't know any better.

Ultimately data can never tell the whole story, but yet we'll act on it as if
it does.

~~~
mpyne
I think one of the other real concerns is that it's not even as if the
government had to be careful when embarking on this journey of increased
surveillance.

The public has made it _very_ clear how little they care about their privacy
on the Internet when they started adopting things like GMail, Facebook,
iCloud, etc. and not just as a convenience, but to actually run and manage
their personal lives.

People, businesses, everyone didn't just not resist the New World of digital
surveillance, they explicitly begged and pleaded for these new capabilities to
be pushed to the fore as a matter of convenience to them.

So who do we blame for this 'new norm'?

------
n00b101
"So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google
cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him
where to file the proposal. In the shredder."

This advertisement paid for by your friendly, co-located, on-premise,
enterprise hardware vendors.

~~~
lawrence
Bingo. If I were selling on premise software, this would be in my deck.
Selling fear is one of the oldest sales tricks in the book.

I do believe however that enterprises act more rationally than consumers. So
while consumers seem to be falling in to the "meh, I don't have anything to
hide" camp, enterprises tend to be a bit more conservative. The thought of the
NSA's private contractors going through customer data and hr records could
actually be enough to slow down some of these enterprise SaaS companies.

------
amac
This story is pathetic, it will sell news but it's pretty much nonsense.
Clearly, the new era of computing upon us - networked computing - and with it
will bring with lots of opportunities as well as many problems to solve.

Privacy is one such problem, but it's one we can work together to solve.
Humans are capable of this, and capable of more than just writing stuff to
cause division like the article.

------
hamsternipples
snowden is not the story. it has remained obvious to me that the NSA or
whatever organization (rusian, chinese, or whatever) does not need some sort
of dinosaur spygame facility to access this data.

all they need is just one underpaid programmer without a soul working at
facebook to compromise the whole database.

wouldn't it be much easier in a case such as this one, for verizon to just
have some retard patsy create that backdoor? I would imagine this to be a get
out of jail free card for those guys really pulling the strings. all you gatta
do is drop all the blame on some naive techie and let him go down in flames.

IMO, the next up in this chess game, is a traitor techie willing to compromise
a whole nation to pay his bills.

------
northwest
> Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is.

The fate of the internet's not the story. The fate of democracy is.

The fate of democracy's not the story. The fate of our society is.

The fate of our society's not the story. The fate of humanity is.

------
gulfie
Don't cry for the internet, it's already gone.

------
snambi
why everyone is crying about spying issue. The original purpose of internet is
military. US government gave access all of access to the internet, because we
all wanted to use it. That doesn't mean US govt cannot use it the way it wants
to use it.

------
guard-of-terra
"If, as a political dissident, you had to choose between organizing your
protest on Facebook or Vkontakte, Facebook’s Russian equivalent, you’d be far
better off doing it on Facebook."

Lol, no, you aren't.

What you do is use every platform available.

~~~
northwest
"What you do is use every platform available."

Lol, no, you don't.

What you do is exclusively use one of the "darknet" platforms:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29)

Of course, _everybody_ wins from using one of the encrypted distributed p2p
platforms, not just activists.

~~~
guard-of-terra
If you're an activist, you need numbers. Eyeballs. You don't care about
surveillance - you care about censorships. So you use everything.

For private coordination, that's another matter.

------
lettergram
The whole idea of surveillance truly doesn't bother me because there is
literally nothing I can do if the higher end government did ever decided they
wanted me. Since the 50's they've had the ability to listen into conversations
via a laser on a window:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone)
and if anyone really ever believed that the internet would be much different
they probably didn't think it all the way through.

Sure the internet had that possibility not to be monitored and for a time it
probably was, but clearly no longer. Further, I think the idea of mass data
collection is monstrous however there is nothing I, nor you can really do
about that except perhaps hiding as much of our data as we can (via
encryption). Even if our data is encrypted in the end if they want your data
they can get your data.

The thing I find interesting about this article is the idea that eventually
the internet could be closed off only to a few nation states. I disagree this
would ever happen because Pandora's box has been opened and some communication
will always be allowed via wireless connections, hidden cables, or some other
method. Obviously, the average user might be affected, but just like the
soviet union fell so would what ever country decided to block off their
nation.

People don't care about surveillance for the most part, as someone already
commented: "I've talked to two people about this issue. Their answers were
"Whatever, I don't care" and "honestly, I get it. If they're catching
terrorists..."" They do however care if you disconnect their internet, and if
any country was to do that in the end it would fail. The point being, the
article stated that nation states of internet would develop and my reasoning
points to that not happening (at least based off what i've seen). In my honest
opinion, the internet has always been a place to communicate, but about as
secure with my data as a friend you never quite trust with your secrets. What
scares me is not the internet surveillance or my government hunting down (in
my opinion) an innocent man. What horrifies me the most is that no matter what
we do the surveillance will only become more intense (as the price of
computing/computers gets lower) and there is no going back. 50 years from now,
what am I going to be faced with and will I be able to continue to just ignore
these B.S. laws we have, or if I unlock my cell phone will I really go to jail
for 10 years?

That's what thoughts keep me up at night, not the idea of my data being
collected at mass online (although I would stop it if there was any way I
could), but the idea that even offline walking down the street or in my own
home I may be required to follow the laws which are outright ridiculous.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I don't personally object to _individual_ surveillance; there's nothing
fundamentally wrong with getting a warrant and watching an individual with the
reasonable suspicion of them committing a crime. Sometimes that process is
abused, and that does concern me, but as you suggested there's little to do
about that other than push for oversight.

I do, however, object to mass surveillance of all traffic, with the goal of
either retroactively looking at the records or putting together patterns.

And I'd like to see both legal and technical solutions to that problem. Legal,
in that I'd like to see enough pushback to demonstrate widespread belief in
the fundamental _wrongness_ of mass surveillance, and technical, in the form
of systems to enforce the inability to tap communications at any point other
than the two endpoints. I'd like to see our networks and communication
protocols designed to make it impossible to spy on traffic between two parties
without either the consent and cooperation of one party or an ongoing security
breach of the physical systems of one party. That would result in a world in
which you can't cast a broad net, but instead can only do targeted
surveillance of specific individuals.

