F-Secure's Hypponen: The Internet Is a 'US Colony'

nk497 writes "Web users are vulnerable to mass online spying because the U.S. has too much power online, according to a leading security researcher. Discussing revelations of U.S. spying at his LinuxCon keynote speech, F-Secure's chief research officer Mikko Hypponen argued that the internet had 'become a U.S. colony,' at the expense of democracy. 'We're back in the age of colonization,' he said. 'We should think about the Americans as our masters.' Hypponen argued that its dominance over the web gave the U.S. too much power over foreign countries, noting that while the majority of European politicians likely use U.S. services every day, most U.S. politicians and business leaders don't, for example, use Swedish-based cloud services. 'It's an imbalanced situation,' he said. 'All the major services are based in the U.S.'"

Comments

Re:Lesser of Evils?

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying this as a European, the European one would eradicate all anonymity in the name of getting rid of every last trace of "hate speech", "antifeminism" etc.

Re:stfu.

[lgw]

That's quite a reasonable comment, actually. (Somebody mod the AC up?)

Most consumer-level internet resources are in the US because the datacenters are. The datacenters are mostly in the US because it's still a nice place to start a company, and most of the companies have their HQ here. I'm not sure whether the key is where the corporate HQ is located, or where the datacenter is located, but I'm thinking either makes you vulnerable. Many countries' governments are seeing a problem with this.

That being the case, it presents a real risk for fragmentation of the internet. Countries won't want their people all going to a foreign company and datacenter just to escape spying (better to be spied on by a foreign power that doesn't share with your government), and breaking the internet along government boundaries would be tragic.

Maybe a better answer is to just fix the US. What if we just defunded the NSA, fired everyone, scrapped all the datacenters, demolished the buildings, and salted the earth? OK, we'd be at somewhat higher risk of terrorism because of the loss of SIGINT, and we wouldn't want to lose that forever, plus we'd need SIGINT again before some major power goes to war again (sure to happen inevitably), but I think the cost might be worth the value of the object lesson about government overreach.