As long as the engineers who design and build the internet care, we can do ok.
If the protocols that run the web are so easily compromised, it raises all kinds of problems with the underlying, somewhat invisible, functions to how the world works. That manifests itself as a liability to for-profit corporations. It also is something that the cat pictures people care about -- how many of them want their webcams capturing video of them walking around their rooms naked or wake up one morning and notice their brokerage account is empty? Very few.
It is quite an irony that governments demand one set of standards for privacy and security while attempting to compromise them for their own benefit (European countries carry just as much blame here.)
> As long as the engineers who design and build the internet care, we can do ok.
If the engineers who designed and built the internet cared about privacy, internet protocols wouldn't completely ignore privacy. They designed a massive routed network that involves packet forwarding between random untrusted nodes and then built a bunch of plain-text protocols on top (SMTP, HTTP, etc).
> how many of them want their webcams capturing video of them walking around their rooms naked or wake up one morning and notice their brokerage account is empty?
Probably none, but the government wouldn't do that. That's not how abuse of power works in liberal democracies. Targeting the majority is a voter-loser. You have to target minorities: hacktivists, terrorists, etc.
> It is quite an irony that governments demand one set of standards for privacy and security while attempting to compromise them for their own benefit
Nothing ironic about it. The whole premise of liberal democracy is that government needs to exist as an entity with powers superior to those of individuals, but as a check on that power must be subject to majoritarian control. You don't have to agree with that premise, but it's consistent with different standards of privacy for individuals and the government.
I often agree with you, but the statement that the Internet founders didn't care about privacy is factually incorrect: Vint Cerf (as mentioned by the sibling comment) is on record as not only being in favor of privacy but wishing the technology had existed for practical cryptographically secure authentication at the protocol level at the time the Internet was designed.
Had the original TCP/IP protocols as they were designed included cryptographic security, the designers of those protocols would themselves have had to be be pioneers of cryptography. This is a little like asking why Henry Ford didn't just start with the electric car. I mean, sure, there was electricity when he started...
> If the engineers who designed and built the internet cared about privacy
I believe Vint Cerf cares an awful lot about privacy. But, as he has stated countless times, this internetwork was supposed to be an experiment. Who would ever design a real network with only billions of addresses?
If the protocols that run the web are so easily compromised, it raises all kinds of problems with the underlying, somewhat invisible, functions to how the world works. That manifests itself as a liability to for-profit corporations. It also is something that the cat pictures people care about -- how many of them want their webcams capturing video of them walking around their rooms naked or wake up one morning and notice their brokerage account is empty? Very few.
It is quite an irony that governments demand one set of standards for privacy and security while attempting to compromise them for their own benefit (European countries carry just as much blame here.)