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Schneier: The US Government Has Betrayed the Internet, We Need To Take It Back
wabrandsma writes "Quoting Bruce Schneier in the Guardian: 'The NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. We engineers built the internet – and now we have to fix it. Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us.
This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.
And by we, I mean the engineering community. Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention. But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can – and should – do."
Demand IPv6. Yell at your ISP. At least ask for it and tell them how important it is. With IPv6 people can start running own servers and more P2P stuff. The Internet before the last 10 years worked that way and it was good. The "Internet" of today is centralized and that is a major problem. No wonder it's easy for Intelligence agencies to do what they are doing if the only thing they need to do is attack 10 or 20 corporations to succeed.
Teach people around you about technology, encryption and how the Internet works. Give them an image of how their clear-text messages hop around and where they land and what happens to it when it does.
Don't be ignorant and don't say stuff like "well, I've known it all the time - I don't have anything to hide anyway so I don't care". Are your really sure about that? Do you know how your life will look like in 10 or 20 years time and how the political climate will look like where you live at that point?
Support organizations fighting for your freedom - I don't care if it's EFF, FSF, Pirate Party or something else. There are people willing to take on the big guys for you when you are not, but they can't do it without your help.
I worry more about the NSA putting something in the binary on popular linux distributions. If they modified the c compiler to put backdoors in the programs it creates it would be very hard to detect. The backdoors would not be in any visible source code but would magically get inserted during the compilation, especially the complilation of a new compiler.
Does anyone know if anyone is actively looking for that type of exploit?