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Berners-Lee Says No To Internet Snooping
Jack Spine writes "The inventor of the World Wide Web has pointed out some of the dangers of deep packet inspection. Sir Tim said that ISPs 'snooping' on data was similar to the interception of mail. 'This is very important to me, as what is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium,' Berners-Lee said on Wednesday. TBL's comments come as the UK government is gearing up to intercept all web communications in the UK through the Intercept Modernisation Programme, and echo comments he made last year about Phorm."
PGP keys only help with email.
Far better to move the entire web to ONLY ssl based servers, (after fixing ssl of course).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Where have YOU been living?
1. I have _multiple_ active GPG keys. All Ubuntu has GPG on them by default.
2. I use TOR regularly, which uses multiple levels of encryption.
3. I use HTTPS sites regularly. Not the old dinky 40bit keys either.
4. My filesystem on my laptops are encrypted via DM_CRYPT and Luks.
5. Every machine I communicate with has SSH. Therefore, I also have encrypted data tunnels for everything.
6. I use W.A.S.T.E.
Yeah. That whole encryption thing died out a while back. Uh huh.
the promise of the internet is free and open communications.
What we do with our data is entirely up to us, and nobody else. Not "the government", not ISPs. This includes encrypting whatever is being transmitted.
You may share any paper, report, program, comment that is yours to publish. Some communications using the Internet should be more like a phone conversation (before USAPATRIOT stupidity), in which a modicum of privacy is a reasonable presumption.
When governments start snooping on everything they make it harder to snoop on criminals in the future. This makes lots more people want secure networks, which makes more people create tools to make it easy to send/receive encrypted data, which makes even the people who don't know about the issues aware of the issues and tools. Once the tools/protocols become normal, police won't be able to snoop on suspected criminals even with a court order because everything is encrypted.
That'll just make them pass more laws and restrict ISPs so that unsnoopable content isn't allowed. Which will make people start creating stenogrphy tools so things look snoopable, which will make other people aware of the issues and wonder why the gov't is so concerned and start using them.
Then people start using those tools and snooping becomes more expensive (trying to detect stenogaphy) and still useless. But it will get lots of otherwise innocent people in trouble for using encryption or stenography to do something unimportant like send email to their mother.
If police stick to treating everyone as innocent until they had a valid reason to think otherwise and then got a court order they will have a lot more ability to snoop in the future.