Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
People act like the US is the only country to have ever spied, when really, in this case, they just got caught. How do you know that others wouldn't be doing the same sort of monitoring? How do you know that they're not already?
Israel has been colonizing the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights since 1967l. Turkey has been colonizing Cyprus since 1974, probably encouraged by the example set by Israel. China has been colonizing Tibet since the 50's.
There are probably other examples but these are three of the most notable that continue today.
Where are the non-US-based search engines, social media sites, video hosts, and email providers? Yes they exist, of course, but there are almost no notable standouts. For every Vimeo there's a dozen US-based YouTubes.
You only have yourself to blame for complacently letting US businesses dominate these fields. The internet is based on open protocols and open networks. The playing field is level other than the minor niggle of ICANN's control of domain names and DNS root servers (minor since the internet works without DNS and could be replaced with something else). Hell, most countries have an advantage over the US considering our antediluvian telecom infrastructure.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I'd argue that "Colony" is sort of an unfair term: a "Colony" is something that I set up by getting some of my jackbooted thugs together, sailing to your country, and telling you that this is how it's going to be from now on, while drinking gin-and-tonics and exporting your resources to the home country.
On ye olde intertubes, it's sort of hard to 'colonize' somebody (especially since, unlike land, which hasn't been available in the "actually not populated by somebody you'll need to shove if you want to 'discover' it" flavor in centuries to millenia, the internet exists because it is built, and you can build more if you want more), except on the very limited scale of cracking their server and stashing stuff on it.
It seems that it might be fairer to say that the internet is more of an American shopping mall. It is true that, to a surprising degree (especially surprising in areas that have never liked us much, or for which we never bothered to do much localization), that lots of foreign traffic crosses into American-held internet infrastructure to work, play, and do business; but (unlike a 'colony') that isn't because that infrastructure used to belong to somebody else until we grabbed it, and the locals are still stuck there; but because once it was built, people came.
Anybody who doesn't fancy being watched by Uncle Sam, or a EULA-serf of a major American multinational(including US residents) should definitely give some strong consideration to how much of their activity is currently firmly within the grasp of the US government and a few cooperative (except on taxes) corporations; but if they want to get anywhere, the line of thought is going to have to be closer to "So, why does everybody go through $AMERICAN_COMPANY$ anyway, and why isn't there a homegrown equivalent elsewhere?" rather than following the misleading road of some sort of post-colonial process. There simply was no such colonization, so expecting to decolonize is going to fall into exciting category error fun time.
The solution is to bring our own US government back in line with the Constitution, and recognize the spurious nature of arguments about mass and warrantless surveillance.
Making chunks amenable to foreign countries, with less protections (see arguments about Europe spying being literally 100x more intrusive) is just an insensate knee-jerk reaction: it is useful in practice only to bring pressure to bear against the US government to be more open and restricted.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The Crown funded most of the transport, infrastructure and civil service of the American Colonies ....
You Ingrates should have shown more respect to your Sovereign (and the Crown's treasury) and should
not have started that rable-rousing "revolution".
Quiz: The above statements are:
- Ironic
- Bloody right
- Probably made by a no-good, towel-headed communist liberal hippie hommo
Also, I'd prefer American's do the spying instead of Russians or god forbid Mujaheddin army from the garden variety of middle eastern kingdoms/banana republics.
You would really rather be spied on by a country that has the capability to summarily execute you anywhere on the planet via drone strike, than a bunch of radicalized extremists living in tents, who couldn't get close enough to harm you, even if they really really wanted to?
Pardon me for finding that an odd position to hold.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
As the FOSSolytes say: It's all open, fork your own if you don't like our implementation.
That's the problem, if countries *do* fork off their own internet, it's going to make things worse for everyone.
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2013/09/17/brazil-fights-us-internet-hegemony-wants-to-shield-brazilian-data-from-nsa/
Imagine a fractured internet, where if you want your site accessible from the world, you have to buy domain names and have your site be vetted by every country that you want your site accessible from.
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.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You would really rather be spied on by a country that has the capability to summarily execute you anywhere on the planet via drone strike, than a bunch of radicalized extremists living in tents, who couldn't get close enough to harm you, even if they really really wanted to?
I find it rather amusing that you consider England, Russia, and China to be a bunch of "radicalized extremists living in tents".
What this article is bitching about is essentially "Everybody goes to the US to setup companies, data centers, hire tech people, and that's not fair". Bullshit, there's nothing the US does to force people to setup their stuff in the US. There's nothing the US does to penalize anybody in other places.
There are a wide variety of reasons why the internet is "US-centric" for most services, but US having some kind of vague, undefined Authoritarian Control is not one of them.
A lot of people avoid the EU because of Net filters and (in their mind) excessive privacy regulations. People avoid China and Russia because they have little or no confidence those governments are not going to simply take their assets. And more to the point in the case of Russia and China, most people assume they'll have all their data and intellectual property straight ripped off... of course no mention of that recently because right now the NSA is the bogeyman people are hiding from.
If you don't want the internet to be US-centric then it's easy to solve it- make your own country a more appealing place to setup shop. The US offers relative stability in terms of economy, infrastructure, and laws, and if you look at the planet and where communications lines run it's "centralized". You could try setting up in a country in the Middle East, but political instability, poor infrastructure, and lack of a wealth of advanced educational services make it a pretty piss-poor region to consider right now. So if you're going to try and offer Internationally available services the US is currently the logical place to be.
And what are you going to gain by moving elsewhere? Technically the NSA's job IS to spy on other nations, the controversy is that they got caught doing it to US citizens. You still have to worry about the NSA everywhere else, in addition to the local governments. Sure, setup shop in Saudi Arabia, that sounds great until the local Dictator decides you're violating some religious requirement and shuts you down. China? Get ready to see your products show up on the black market with a minimally altered logo affixed. South America somewhere? Nope, there's crap for infrastructure and political stability is a major issue. Asia? Sure, some countries are appealing, but again you're looking at connections to the rest of the world having to go either through the US, or politically unstable regions.
Pardon me for finding that an odd position to hold.
Hold whatever position you desire, but please at least try to base it in some type of semblance of reality.
A false sense of WHAT? I cherry picked WHAT??? I'm sitting here in CALIFOIRNIA just sort of shooting off repsonses to idiots, I'm not writing a peer-reviewed article, just an opinion, AS AN AMERICAN, understanding however that the US GOV is OFF ITS ROCKER as a democratic institution, and I'm a european shill now? So much for land of the free... OUR government is out of control. Scrape the shit out of your eyes, brother. This govnernment set out a plate of delicacies called the "Internet", implicitlly said "I will govern this gift with a benevolant hand", and then whosale helped itself to whatever secrets it wanted. That's morally wrong, I don't care what you say. This government is under the illusion that it knows what's right. The last 10 years show it really isn't. To believe otherwise is to be blind, or complicate.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Would we really be at any higher a risk from terrorism? Personally I feel the antics carried out by the US Government (read my country) are all done under the guise of a war on terror. This war will never win and a whole new generation are being indoctrinated into not questioning the government because they are hunting terrorists to keep you safe.
If I had my way all those shitheads in Washington would be tossed on their fucking ears, and all their assets would be put into the US treasury. Too many politicians these days are in the hip pocket of corporate America.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The Crown funded most of the transport, infrastructure and civil service of the American Colonies...
No, the colonies did becuase George III, a porphyric idiot, started upping the taxes to pay for England's little imperialistic chessmatch with France. The Crown bestowed no gifts. Or was the Boston Tea Party a little fraternity roughhousing?
No, just bunch of traitors and terrorists.