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."

Comments

Inventor of the world wide

[ericrost]

The inventor of the world wide what?

Re:Inventor of the world wide

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Its a typo. It should read "word wide". TBL invented the word "wide" because prior to then most things were narrow.

Re:Inventor of the world wide

[vishbar]

There's a goatse joke to be made here. I'm just not quite sure what it is.

The dream of encryption

[CRCulver]

I remember 10 years ago that every nerd had a PGP key and Schneier's Applied Cryptography was a standard text for our crowd. Now, the majority of even the hard-core geeks no longer have much interest in encryption. Somewhere along the way we forgot that every step forward on the net demands a way to guarantee privacy. Berners-Lee might regret the lack of privacy now, but he and other luminaries weren't vocal enough about the need for encryption and lots of it.

Re:The dream of encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

The promise of the internet is free and open data. Encryption is anti-everything the internet is about.

The real death of the internet was ~10 years ago, when anonymous posting disappeared.

Re:The dream of encryption

[icebike]

PGP keys only help with email.

Far better to move the entire web to ONLY ssl based servers, (after fixing ssl of course).

Re:The dream of encryption

[Creepy Crawler]

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.

Re:The dream of encryption

[FooAtWFU]

Weirdo.

Re:The dream of encryption

[0100010001010011]

Because most of us came to this realization: http://xkcd.com/538/ or the fact that 90% of it doesn't matter.

All of my Tax documents and other financial stuff is on a 256-bit encrypted disk image. But why the hell do I need to encrypt the message to my mom about my Easter plans? Furthermore, how do I explain to someone that just learned to use a computer that Obama wants to know if it's going to be Ham or Turkey.

And the last time I planned something big and illegal we sure as hell didn't EMAIL each other about it, we met in person. (3 friends of mine all worked at Taco Bell through High School. Summer before college we planned a heist of the flags off the top. I still have a flag I fly on Rugby trips with the Taco Bell Dog.)

Re:The dream of encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that's the thing. Anonymous posting provided one form of security that's no longer feasibly available. Encryption allows better privacy. As more and more cultures/subcultures/thought-pattern-sharers participate on the web, conflicts and clashes are more and more likely to happen. Opportunistic encryption, as long as it is controllable, will make the web a mutual haven for all cultures. One community can keep their convos/files/culture to themselves, while others can still broadcast theirs. The hearts and minds of people, no matter where they are geographically, are the final battlefield for a fight that should never take place, and encryption is one way to help ensure it never does.

Posting AC because I have mod points and also I seem to have started rambling.

Re:The dream of encryption

[lenski]

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.

Re:The dream of encryption

[Creepy Crawler]

What do you mean "Weirdo"?

Anybody that uses a Unix based system (BSD, Linux, Solaris) all use a variant of OpenSSH.
Anybody that buys stuff on the net uses 128bit SSL.
Even that child porn dude that's in the supreme court knew enough to use TrueCrypt.

Or even another encryption used: WEP and WPA. There's 2 very standard, "non-weird" encryptions. They just arent terribly strong.

Re:The dream of encryption

[Red Flayer]

Because most of us came to this realization: http://xkcd.com/538/ or the fact that 90% of it doesn't matter.

The problem with the xkcd cartoon is that it only applies if whoever wants your information knows that you have it.

The point of general encryption is that fishing expeditions are impossible... so the "juicy" stuff that would warrant attention from the powers that be is hidden in the morass of all the other encrypted data.

Yes, a ten-dollar hammer can be used to get my keys from me... but how do you know I've got the goods if you've never been able to read anyone's data?

Re:The dream of encryption

[Lord Ender]

Key exchange is hard.

If we had signed DNS, and DNS started distributing X.509 certificates ("type CERT queries"), then secure email really would hit the mainstream.

Re:The dream of encryption

[TrekkieGod]

Because most of us came to this realization: http://xkcd.com/538/ or the fact that 90% of it doesn't matter.

All of my Tax documents and other financial stuff is on a 256-bit encrypted disk image. But why the hell do I need to encrypt the message to my mom about my Easter plans?

Because if somebody's watching you send all those messages to your mom about Easter plans and then suddenly see encrypted traffic, they're going to know that the encrypted traffic must have been special and then come after you with the wrench?

Re:The dream of encryption

[0100010001010011]

The world has moved beyond simply sending encrypted e-mails back and forth. Steganography, torrents, tor, etc.

If I REALLY wanted to coordinate killing the president or something big. I'd probably use YouTube or Craigslist where the Signal to Noise is infinitely small. I'd embed an encrypted stegano message inside video of a guy lighting farts on fire or 'casual encounter' ad. Heck, put up some eBay listings with big pictures. How do you know that latest version of Heroes you downloaded from Bit Torrent doesn't have a 5MB image embedded in it with the President's route on some foreign trip?

How about those Spam messages that look like a ton of gibberish, do you know they're not some secret code?

I'm sure if a few Slashdoters put their minds to it, they could come up with a bit more ingenious ways of sending messages than 'plain text' encrypted PGP e-mails.

The next terrorist isn't going to suddenly start sending encrypted messages from a normal account.

Re:The dream of encryption

[broken_chaos]

Encryption works for very important data (that you would die to protect), less important data transferred over a network (moderately important e-mails), and unimportant data as a form of misdirection (if everything is encrypted, no one can tell what's important or not).

Full disk encryption, while nice, is not a protection for your data from someone who really wants it, unless you will die to protect it. It is protection from casual thieves for things like passwords, credit card data, personal information (your contact lists, for instance).

Re:The dream of encryption

[Sloppy]

Now, the majority of even the hard-core geeks no longer have much interest in encryption.

Then they're not hard-core geeks.

Geez, they're not even soft-core geeks. In December 2005, paranoid what-if rants about theoretical risks, became mainstream knowledge. If you're awake (geek or not), you know we have to start encrypting.

Re:The dream of encryption

[Sloppy]

PGP keys only help with email.

Far better to move the entire web to ONLY ssl based servers, (after fixing ssl of course).

And the way to fix SSL, is to switch to using PGP keys.

Re:The dream of encryption

[Sloppy]

A lot of very foolish people have overgeneralized the point of that cartoon.

The $5 wrench attack does work to defeat encryption, but it only works when someone is specifically interested in you.

The bad guys cannot put a $5 wrench on the backbone and slurp up everything. The only way they can do that, is if people agree to not encrypt.

If you encrypt, you defeat massive-scale surveillance. And you are not defeating a theoretical attack; you're not even defeating a plausible attack. You defeat an attack that the US government is known to be using.

You don't need to read phrack or 2600 to know about this; read the New York Times or turn on your TV and watch Frontline. Get your head out of the sand.

Re:The dream of encryption

[Sloppy]

But why the hell do I need to encrypt the message to my mom about my Easter plans?

Because I might be looking for houses to burgle on Easter.

Because privacy should be the default. Instead of asking why your plans should be secret, ask why your plans should be public. It's just as legitimate of a question.

And the last time I planned something big and illegal we sure as hell didn't EMAIL each other about it, we met in person.

Good for you. But there's more to life than planning crimes, and there are other threats than government law enforcement (they just happen to be the most high-profile). I know some people think that the only purpose of the internet is for pedophiles to trade porn, but really, people do have other uses for it. Most of those uses are nobody else's business. If you wanted the world to know your Easter plans, you could have posted them to Usenet. Instead, you chose email.

Re:The dream of encryption

[ClosedSource]

"The promise of the internet is free and open data."

I thought the promise of the internet was free porn.

Seriously, it started as a government program and open and free communications was not the goal.

Re:The dream of encryption

[hairyfeet]

And you just accidently hit on the reason why having that stuff can have you sent to PMITA prison. Did you catch it? Here I'll point it out-"Even that child porn dude that's in the supreme court knew enough to use TrueCrypt.". The simple facts are that law enforcement HATES encryption, because it means they have to bust their ass instead of running a simple scan for *.whatever. So I have no doubt you will see more and more prosecutors using "You know why he has that stuff and won't let us go through his files? It is because he is a child molester! Are you going to let him get away with that?" And sadly juries who think all the crap they see on CSI and Numbers is real will think you must be some "elite child molesting super hacker" because the cops can't crack your crypto and you will get to rot in jail until you let them go through your stuff because "If you did nothing wrong you have nothing to hide".

I have had talks with a friend working state crime lab and believe me, they would love nothing more than to only allow crypto that had state approved back doors in it. He told me the reason the only "child pornographers" you see arrested is the loser in his basement whacking off to the same crap that has been floating around since the old BBS days is because the REAL bad guys are passing encrypted DVDs to each other through the mail. He said the few they have busted were because one of their victims talked but when they snatched all the data everything was so locked down with crypto there was no way to trace it back to their partners. And when a guy is already facing 400+ years good luck with getting him to rat.

Sadly right there is the problem, good men that can not see the evil they are pushing. He and his friends in the lab see nothing wrong with demanding everyone's data be accessible because they are not evil men and would only use it to protect kids. What they don't see is that for every one of them there are a thousand Karl Rove style scumbags that would happily abuse any power they can get their dirty little hands on if it meant that their "enemies" got burnt. Just look at the spying on civil rights leaders in the 60s or warrantless wiretapping now. But how to convince the good men that allowing some evil doers to escape to protect us all is the dilemma that we all must face. Because with "child porn" being like the red scare of the 50s, with parents scared to death that pervos are hiding around every bush, it is simply becoming too easy to use that word and get any law passed that they desire.

While I hope we don't end up with "Trusted Internet" or some other way to ensure that those in power can always access your data that certainly seems to be the way that those in law enforcement want it to go. We just have to find a way to convince people that defending the idea of privacy is not the same as advocating criminal sexual activity. Because ATM all it takes is for a prosecutor to bring up "those two words" in front of a jury and you're screwed, even if all you are doing is trying to keep Big Brother out of your data. Privacy doesn't really mean anything anymore as long as those two words hold so much power in the minds and hearts of juries. It is truly scary times we are living in.

Re:The dream of encryption

[sortius_nod]

It did, you just bought the Vista version...

A slashdot poster would like to use sarcasm.

[Cancel] [Allow]

Re:The dream of encryption

[geekgirlandrea]

We never went anywhere. I still read Applied Cryptography from time to time. I also:

• Run a private XMPP server for me and my girlfriend which only accepts SSL connections.
• Operate a tor exit.
• Attach a PGP signature to every e-mail I send.
• Still think anonymous digital cash schemes are a really cool idea.

The problem is mostly that there are so few other people who seem to care. I send a digital signature on every e-mail, but as far as I know no one ever verifies it. I've sent and received maybe two *encrypted* messages in my life. I talk to my girlfriend through a private XMPP server, because she's a huge nerd just like me, but pretty much every other IM conversation I have goes out over the wire in plaintext and passes through some faceless corporation's servers. Anonymous digital cash is full of awesome, and I keep meaning to write a implementation of it one of these days, but there just don't seem to enough of us anarchistic crypto nerds around thinking that to make it economically viable. Of all the cool cryptographic tricks I've read about, the only one that seems to have gotten to the point of a practical, usable system is tor.

I think part of that is that a lot of the existing cool ideas have had flawed implementations that impede practical use. I think PGP's web of trust is seriously flawed, for example. Most of the time the only thing about a key that I care about is whether the person that knows the private key is also the legitimate owner of the associated e-mail address, but in order to sign someone's key, I also need to assent to whole list of other, harder to verify statements about that key. It should have had people sign separate statements relating the key to some other form of identity rather than the key itself, so I could say "The person who knows the private key corresponding to public key ID 20344213 also has the e-mail address blah@blah.com" without also having to say, for every other bit of identity attached to their public key, "The person who knows the private key corresponding to public key ID 20344213 also has the legal name Blah X. Blahson" or even "The photograph attached to public key ID 20344213 is a photograph of the person who knows the corresponding private key".

Somehow, I think if that issue went away, we wouldn't magically see everyone in the world suddenly using PGP, though. Fundamentally, the problem is that 99% of the people just don't give a damn about privacy. Out of the remaining 1%, most either still don't care enough to bother with cryptography, or don't understand how it works and are convinced the NSA has a secret backdoor in everything or something. Look at every Slashdot article about electronic voting. Everyone complains that, as actually implemented, it fundamentally depends on trusting the voting machines, and there is every reason to believe that they can't be trusted. Okay, that's pretty much true, but then the proposed solution is always "leave a paper trail", but that just requires you to trust a handful of corruptible humans instead of a machine. Maybe that's better, but it's not much better. No one ever mentions those all those lovely cryptographic voting protocols from Applied Cryptography, that, if implemented properly, could let you vote from your own machine using an open-source client speaking a standard protocol, and not have to trust *anyone*. Well, I guess for the mindless masses understanding cryptography like that is so far over their heads that they might as well just be blindly trusting the protocol designers, but I would have hoped for better from Slashdot geeks.

Freedom to Conspire

[MarkvW]

Which side are you on: CONTROL or KAOS? That is the question. The Government can only answer that question if it can intercept your communications. Are you going to let them? Can you stop them? Do you care?

All I can say is that you should Get Smart!

This is good

[damburger]

People like Sir Tim need to speak out on such issues, because their contributions to science and technology are touted by our leaders as 'proof' of Britain being a modern, forward thinking society - rather than the withered, reactionary, largely technophobic old empire we in fact are.

Re:At this point does it need to be said?

[Boomerang Fish]

Yeah, I used to do this...

Then I lost the key due to a hard drive and floppy disk failure within the same week (wow, that dates this a bit...)

Now I have these wonderful encrypted documents that contain proof of alien intervention with the history of our planet and I can't get at it anymore...

D*MN YOU GRAYS!!!

--
I drank what?

Re:At this point does it need to be said?

[Obfuscant]

Now I have these wonderful encrypted documents that contain proof of alien intervention with the history of our planet and I can't get at it anymore...

Just mail a copy of each one to yourself at another account and someone will decrypt them for you. I can't tell you who, I've already told you too much and I'm afraid awi3qu91 108OI)

[NO CARRIER]

Re:At this point does it need to be said?

[Obfuscant]

Not because it will bite you in the ass, but because by encrypting everything you 1) give them more stuff to look at and if they are looking at you they aren't looking at me, and 2) it won't be obvious that you are trying to hide something when you DO encrypt that particularly incriminating file. They'll have to spend time decrypting your email to Mom as well as the picture of cousin Julie when she was 4.

Privacy for the rest of us

[schwaang]

Encryption gives a sometimes false sense of security, and the technology is a hassle. It's better to reinforce societal expectations for privacy where it is due, and let social mechanisms (like laws and market reputation) do the job.

Consider e.g. that if you use https from your workplace and see the happy little lock icon in FF or IE, you probably feel safe.

But some workplaces insert a proxy in between you and gmail (or what have you), having stuffed the proxy's certificate on your (their) work machine through local policy. Unbeknownst to you, your employer then sees the communication which you thought was totally private. Now imagine if an ISP could do that and get away with it.

The point is that even if you do *care*, the technology is hard to keep track of, and there is an arms-race ladder of one-upmanship that makes this a never-ending game, which some nerds can win, and most of us will lose.

What will really keep you safe is to stand up for a reasonable expectation of privacy where it should exist, and create norms and laws that protect this. Saying "NO" to Phorm or other invasions by ISPs is part of that approach, and creates legal and commercial consequences that are more effective than asking every grandma to mess with PGP.

bad long-term solution

[a2wflc]

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.

Re:What a fucking fantasy land Sir Timmy lives in.

[Timosch]

So basically the consequence of what you're saying is "Ban encryption, because those bloddy terrorists/chinese spies/pedophiles/software pirates might use it to do something evil"? Yeah, good idea. Tomorrow on CNN: Door locks banned. They prevent police from entering criminals' homes, police say.

Re:What a fucking fantasy land Sir Timmy lives in.

[DMUTPeregrine]

Lack of QoS is not a good thing. I want routers to respect the IP TOS field. It's there for a reason. Lack of non-standard QoS is the bad thing. With QoS I can use bittorrent and play games at the same time, without it there's no prioritization and the game lags. It's the deep-packet inspection that's intrusive crap.

Post office also ask about the content in mail

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Sir Tim said that ISPs 'snooping' on data was similar to the interception of mail

Actually, if you think about it, the Post Office also ask about the _type_ of content in your mail: document (letter) ? CD/books ? or fire arms ? ;-)

i admit Post office does not read the words in your letter.

Re:At this point does it need to be said?

[element-o.p.]

I'd encrypt everything simply to protest the big-brother mentality that seems to be taking over here in the U.S. >:]