Snowden and the Fate of the Internet As a Global Network

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "John Naughton writes in the Guardian that the insight that seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media regarding the revelations from Edward Snowden is how the US has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data proving that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. 'The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system,' writes Naughton. 'Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA.' This spells the end of the internet as a truly global network. 'It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.' Naughton adds that given what we now know about how the US has been abusing its privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable. 'Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes?' writes Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission. 'Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally, and providers will miss out on a great opportunity.'"

Comments

Encryption:

[Redeye Carci]

Something to actually use.

Re:Encryption:

[aaaaaaargh!]

Technical solutions to social & political problems don't work.

Re:Encryption:

[lister king of smeg]

Technical solutions to social & political problems don't work.

Really you want to try brute force decrypt 4092 bit random key encrypted folder stored to random joe's sky drive folder? No, well neither does the NSA.

Re:Encryption:

[Penguinisto]

One small problem - encrypted messages won't get very far if the packets are blocked as being non-readable by whatever censorship authority runs the firewall/choke-point/etc.

A truly 'Balkanized' Internet would mean that there would be choke-points through which packets have to travel between subnets.

Now if you said 'steganography' instead, well, different story. But an obviously encrypted message would likely be blocked cold.

Re:Encryption:

[localman57]

If Random Joe doesn't share it with anybody, they probably don't give a shit. The NSA is perfectly happy to let Random Joe sit around enjoying his porn collection. But when people start working together, they get interested. They care if Random Joe is going to share it with somebody at somepoint. And they're real interested in that. Even if they never decrypt it, they can tell that Random Joe uploaded it, and Random Bob downloaded it. Now, the interesting question is what is the relationship between Random Joe and Random Bob? That connection between those two is valuable information, and you can get it without ever decrypting the actual data.

Re:Encryption:

[JaredOfEuropa]

Technical solutions can to some degree mitigate social and political problems. Using encryption isn't going to solve the issue of governmental and commercial parties snooping and sharing stuff that we the people do not want them to access, nor will it solve the deeper issue of these organisations thinking that they have a right to access that data to begin with, but encryption can reduce the amount of useful data they can actually access.

In this case, the solution fails for technical / practical reasons. Corporations do not use "the cloud" just for storage, but for processing of data as well, which means it'll have to exist in plaintext on the cloud server at some point. If you want your data to be secure, you should certainly encrypt it, but you aso should stop using the cloud for anything but storage of already encrypted data.

Re:Encryption:

[TapeCutter]

Now, the interesting question is what is the relationship between Random Joe and Random Bob?

You've nailed it. The secret service does not exist to crush dissent, it exists to crush organised dissent before it takes root.. They collect "meta data" not because of the fig-leaf of privacy it affords but because it holds the information they want - relationships between "subversives" (real or imagined). Trawling a gazzillion emails for key phrases is inefficient and error prone, the network of relationships tell you exatly which individuals to remove to most effectively dismantle the entire organisation.

Trivia: Biologists use the same network analysis methods to identify key species in different habitats.

Free speech*

[i kan reed]

*As long as that speech falls into the category of things that benefits the U.S. government.

Re:WTF?

[qbast]

Don't forget to return HTML/WWW to CERN first. Then you can talk about 'very little outside help'.

This isn't news.

[intermodal]

It's always been the elephant in the room. The only new thing is that it has become obvious to a larger number of people that encryption isn't just an "in case" precaution. Anyone who knows anything about the way the Internet works has been aware for years that nothing is secure unless you both encrypt it and control the only means to decrypt it (either by encrypting it to someone's public key whom you trust or by encrypting it for your own secure decryption later).

So again, the only real change is that the tinfoil hats were verifiably right for once. The question nobody seems to be answering is, what (other than nothing) will the general public do about it? The answer to that is, only as much as they are forced to.

Re:WTF?

[jobsagoodun]

And we Brits want our Turing Machines back!

Re:What's the benefit of privacy from the governme

[Anonymous Coward]

If a citizen of the United States is not committing a crime, then why does the United States Government need to know the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?

Re:What's the benefit of privacy from the governme

[geminidomino]

That's not a concern. That's just a paraphrase of "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide."

If one is still asking that question at this point, when it has been answered a hundred ways on a hundred days, then he doesn't care about any answer, and will continue to dismiss it.

Re:What's the benefit of privacy from the governme

[sosume]

I've got nothing to hide, so there is no reason to look. Should work both ways.

Re:What's the benefit of privacy from the governme

[Penguinisto]

This is why:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Long story short? Unless the government has demonstrable cause to read/know the full text of "everything", it's none of their fucking business.

The Business Perspective

[Bob9113]

My congressional rep is a pretty far right "We gotta stop the terr'rists" type. I've been trying to figure out the message that will ring with him, to help him understand what we have at stake here. I think it is this: Surveillance cannot become a condition of purchasing American goods and services, or we will lose business. And the solution is already in use in New Jersey:

"Under settled New Jersey law, individuals do not lose their right to privacy simply because they have to give information to a third-party provider, like a phone company or bank, to get service."

I don't want to play to stereotypes, but the reality is that New Jersey is host to some of the traditionally hard-to-crack criminal enterprises. Yet they have decided that the ability to do business must not take a back seat to making law enforcement a little easier. We cannot let surveillance become a condition of purchasing American goods and services.

Re:WTF?

[sandertje]

Von Neumann was born in Hungary; he moved to the US in 1933. Einstein was a German; he moved to the US only in 1933, decades after he published his famous relativity theory in the 1910s. Now, if we were to follow your logic and only those countries where technology x was invented can use this technology, then the US would still be a well.... hunter-gatherer society. You can attribute many 20th century inventions to US citizens, but they tend to build on earlier industrial revolution technology. And where did that happen? Right, in Europe. Now, take your nationalistic bullshit, and put it up your ass. Technology is for all of mankind.

Oh The Irony...

[SuperCharlie]

The most ironic and insidious part of this whole mess is.. They got us to pay for the surveillance network above our taxes. They got us to pay for the cable lines, they got us to pay for the websites, they got us to pay for Windows, they got us to pay for iPhones and Android phones, they got us to practically beg for all of it and take our money.to build our own cages.

Re:Telegraph: They don't tap than service!

[Half-pint HAL]

Also, while you can encrypt to your hear's content, how do you pass people you want to communicate to securely a private key to encrypt and decrypt with?

You don't, you pass them a public key, and you keep the private key to yourself. You encrypt with your private key, they decrypt with your public key; they encrypt with your public key, you decrypt with your private key. This is the wonderfully symmetrical maths of pair-of-primes cryptosystems.