Slashdot Mirror
German Chancellor Proposes European Communications Network
An anonymous reader sends word that German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to build a European communication network to keep data transmission away from the United States. She plans to discuss the issue with French President Francois Hollande.
"Merkel said in her weekly podcast that she disapproved of companies such as Google and Facebook basing their operations in countries with low levels of data protection while being active in countries such as Germany with high data protection. 'We'll talk with France about how we can maintain a high level of data protection,' Merkel said. 'Above all, we'll talk about European providers that offer security for our citizens, so that one shouldn't have to send emails and other information across the Atlantic. Rather, one could build up a communication network inside Europe.' Hollande's office confirmed that the governments had been discussing the matter and said Paris agreed with Berlin's proposals."
to the problem of what the NSA is doing. And if an organization does it within Europe, what then?
Angela Merkel: "Screw Obama. I'm going to build my own internet, with blackjack and hookers. And privacy."
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Because what are the chances of it happening yet another time?
"He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard"
I'd much prefer the data to be captured by European organizations than the NSA.
bunch of tax wasting bullshit.
BND & NSA are working together to some extend.
how is this plan keeping our privacy safe?
Well last time "France" "trusted" "Gernany" (without being invaded first) was at the time of Emperor Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse, Karolus Magnus, ...) ...)
that didn't work so bad (untill he died and handed over to his incapable sons who splitted the whole shebang
She needs to grow the fuck up like it would matter when they're already spying on themselves just as much if not more than the NSA. Just to be clear I don't give two shits who is spying on me whether it is the NSA or someone else I DO NOT LIKE IT! PERIOD!
It's an INTERCONNECTED network of networks. Someone can just as easily hook it back up to the 'old' Internet once it comes online.
Won't this European network just be subject to the same censorship and spying paid for by American and Asian entities, as the current internet is anyway? Are there even any non-American and non-Asian entities capable of implementing and maintaining such a large scale network on their own, including using their own custom built non-American, non-Asian hardware, manufactured in a non-American, non-Asian factory?
This is a seriously complex undertaking they're suggesting.
Remember, she's the one who called the Internet 'virgin soil' last year. But she's not the only one who has no clue. Every other week some European politician speaks up, demanding billions of tax payer's money to create an independent European IT industry. These noobs really seem to think there'll be a day when they can say, "Look, Obama, we've got our own Intel, we've got our own Microsoft, you can kiss our asses." At the same time, these guys complain that they can't run their offices with Linux: "It's too complicated for our staff. Give us back our Windows XP, our MS Office, our Internet Explorer."
Yes, leave building such networks to the Germans: they have more than a century experience with building nation-wide espionage and surveillance networks, and they are very good at collecting and mining the resulting data.
Whatever. But it should be free and secure.
No "you are trespassing into EU" messages in my browser and no "visitors from EU will be shot"messages in my browser when trying to look at huffpost.
No spying or recording of ones web activity either.
The emphasis should be on encryption, not physical infrastructure. You can't audit, control and secure physical infrastructure for an internet, because it is by necessity, spread out across a large physical volume. You definitely can make it uneconomic to analyse the traffic.
Of course, this is probably an intentional oversight - all that infrastructure work is a great economic stimulus (or "pork barrel project" if you like). Why cloud the picture with reality when you can both spend billions of Euros on a jingoistic boondoggle AND still be able to collect SIGINT from your own people without difficulty?
Living in Germany, Snowden leaks didn't bother me much (and as I've heard from "Piraten Partei" member, most voters don't care either). I'm of no interests to secret services whatsoever and if checking my emails helps them fight some !@@#ers, I don't mind.
Intent DOES matter to me and I do not think that any government in western democracies would dare misuse this power for oppressing people.
From US perspective, I can understand you guys are worried about some of the surveillance being unconstitutional, but when law is breached at that level, it's like breaking UN laws, there is no authority to punish you.
To my knowledge, US (and, actually Israel) is present at German Exchange Points (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point) so this move is more of a gesture, rather than actual protection.
Nevertheless Merkel's move is good for EU, already because it would create more jobs in Europe, so I welcome it.
We can do a much better job of spying and industrial espionage on our citizens than the NSA can if we build our own network.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Some time ago, there were suggestions by German Telekom of building a German infrastructure to ensure mails sent between German users would not be routed via the USA. Apart from ensuring German authorities would have it easier looking into traffic, I will hazard a guess that Telekom is lobbying to push this through, possibly forcing German providers to connect themselves to some newly designed infrastructure, which would most likely benefit German Telekom (either if they were operating those IXes, or by the lines put in to connect the providers). I do not have numbers as to the percentage, but most large to medium (and many smaller) German providers already are interconnected through DECIX, allowing for a short, cost-effective path between them. Oh, most, except for one - German Telekom (actually, they are connected, but do not have an open peering policy). Coincidence?
Why is it that so many governments seem so clueless with technology?
looks like meat's BACK on the MENU, BOYS!
no no!
no no!
bubbles forming on my penis and i blow them away and they turn into butterflies with a penis face
Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care - Government & Stealth Malware
In Response To Slashdot Article: Former Pentagon Analyst: China Has Backdoors To 80% of Telecoms 87
How many rootkits does the US[2] use officially or unofficially?
How much of the free but proprietary software in the US spies on you?
Which software would that be?
Visit any of the top freeware sites in the US, count the number of thousands or millions of downloads of free but proprietary software, much of it works, again on a proprietary Operating System, with files stored or in transit.
How many free but proprietary programs have you downloaded and scanned entire hard drives, flash drives, and other media? Do you realize you are giving these types of proprietary programs complete access to all of your computer's files on the basis of faith alone?
If you are an atheist, the comparison is that you believe in code you cannot see to detect and contain malware on the basis of faith! So you do believe in something invisible to you, don't you?
I'm now going to touch on a subject most anti-malware, commercial or free, developers will DELETE on most of their forums or mailing lists:
APT malware infecting and remaining in BIOS, on PCI and AGP devices, in firmware, your router (many routers are forced to place backdoors in their firmware for their government) your NIC, and many other devices.
Where are the commercial or free anti-malware organizations and individual's products which hash and compare in the cloud and scan for malware for these vectors? If you post on mailing lists or forums of most anti-malware organizations about this threat, one of the following actions will apply: your post will be deleted and/or moved to a hard to find or 'deleted/junk posts' forum section, someone or a team of individuals will mock you in various forms 'tin foil hat', 'conspiracy nut', and my favorite, 'where is the proof of these infections?' One only needs to search Google for these threats and they will open your malware world view to a much larger arena of malware on devices not scanned/supported by the scanners from these freeware sites. This point assumed you're using the proprietary Microsoft Windows OS. Now, let's move on to Linux.
The rootkit scanners for Linux are few and poor. If you're lucky, you'll know how to use chkrootkit (but you can use strings and other tools for analysis) and show the strings of binaries on your installation, but the results are dependent on your capability of deciphering the output and performing further analysis with various tools or in an environment such as Remnux Linux. None of these free scanners scan the earlier mentioned areas of your PC, either! Nor do they detect many of the hundreds of trojans and rootkits easily available on popular websites and the dark/deep web.
Compromised defenders of Linux will look down their nose at you (unless they are into reverse engineering malware/bad binaries, Google for this and Linux and begin a valuable education!) and respond with a similar tone, if they don't call you a noob or point to verifying/downloading packages in a signed repo/original/secure source or checking hashes, they will jump to conspiracy type labels, ignore you, lock and/or shuffle the thread, or otherwise lead you astray from learning how to examine bad binaries. The world of Linux is funny in this way, and I've been a part of it for many years. The majority of Linux users, like the Windows users, will go out of their way to lead you and say anything other than pointing you to information readily available on detailed binary file analysis.
Don't let them get
Memorable quotes for
Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power."
##
"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm000...
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"It's only logical to assume that conspiracies are everywhere, because that's what people do. They conspire. If you can't get the message, get the man." - Mel Gibson (from an interview)
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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director
##
"The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing - for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy - so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it. As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president - every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial." The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so."
- Victor Marchetti, Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History
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George Carlin:
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city h
we will have a better edge to sell/deny information to you NSA on the SIGINT collected within our GermanNet
All of this is because Telekom is making other ISPs paying insane fes for peering, which forces them to route through the USA instead to have peering at a lower cost indirectly to Telekom (also known as Drosselkom), passing all data directly to the NSA and co.
aaaaaaa
The gouvernment which screwed end-to-end encryption by mandating a centralized "de-mail" concept to communicate with the administration shuts up.
Make a decentralized key signing (e.g. in the city hall) initiative, for a reasonable fee, and show your citizens hot to import these certificates in theirs browsers and mail programs.
Make sure the key generators use a decent random number generation, and for really important messages use one-time pads, or something which comes close.
All of my phones have enough storage for a real one-time pad for my important mail which i send in years. If mail providers would give me this opportunity (one-time pad for connection safety) and a decent PKI signing initiative would guarantee that the recipient can read the mail, then i would be happy.
One time pad connection safety would mean you can use this anywhere and choose a provider to your liking.
Whenever Merkel makes a comment, I instantly wonder what her real intentions are. And this time it didn't take long, she wants control over what information is coming into her area of reign.
If she was honest about wanting the US spying to end she'd first of all ferret out and shut down the various spying locations still scattered across Germany. It's not like the US never had bases there or shut them all down...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's called the Internet - a network of networks where a subset of networks are EU exclusive. The problem is how to make sure that data packets aren't routed outside the EU - but that is another thing entirely. It shouldn't be that hard technically.
Well, actually, the last time France trusted Germany was the formation of the EU.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It will only take couple pictures of children going to school from US agencies shown to members of EU parliament and they can forget about independent network.
The last time France (Alsace) and Germany (Saarland) trusted each other, what followed was the creation of EU.
The problem here is very simple. For the e-reforms EU wants to rely on Internet. They are simply forced to act, because they can't allow potentially sensitive data like tax information to flow via unreliable country like USA. The work in that direction was happening for some time now and I'm not really sure what current initiative entails. The only contentious point was the ICANN. One can see that EU and others want to fork it and if they are successful, the ICANN as we know it would be responsible exclusively for the Americas. IPv6 IMO has room for such actions.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
An extension to TCP/IP is needed, where each packet contains a flag stating that it should not enter US-governed networks.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Whenever Merkel makes a comment, I instantly wonder what her real intentions are. And this time it didn't take long, she wants control over what information is coming into her area of reign.
Correctamundo. There is only one answer for increasing communications freedom and it has nothing to do with an EU network.
If she was honest about wanting the US spying to end she'd first of all ferret out and shut down the various spying locations still scattered across Germany.
Bah, now you're straying well off-topic. Let's try this: The way to make communications free for the people (as in speech, not beer -- though that too) is to promote mesh networking and end-to-end, opportunistic encryption. She wants a more centralized network, which will have the opposite effect to promoting freedom. What we need is complete decentralization, with routing based not on a web of force, but a web of trust. Merkel is only interested in a web of lies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even Merkel's cell phone was reportedly monitored by American spies.
Merkel said in her weekly podcast that she disapproved of companies such as Google and Facebook basing their operations in countries with low levels of data protection while being active in countries such as Germany with high data protection.
Those two statements don't go together.
[Merkel] wants control over what information is coming into her area of reign
She can already pretty much control whatever is coming in, thanks to the routers that do the I/O with Germany. I think what she wants is to control what's going out...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Any large project will have to be advertised in the European Journal and therefore open to competition from ANYWHERE in the world. Then again according to EU rules, the lowest price wins.
I'm on business in India at the moment and the IT services industry is talking about 1T$ (one Trillion) worth of business by 2018.
That is Tata, Mastek and the rest including the offshore arms of Crapita and its ilk.
If you think that a Frenchie with their legal max of 35hours a week and 42 days holiday can beat the Indian crews then think again.
The same goes for just about everywhere in Europe.
Then of course, the NSA could bid at cost price of $0. IF they did that, the cat would really be amongst the canaries.(no pigeons here)
Anyway, go back to your ideal dreamworld where everyone in the EU has a job and is content.
What difference does it make whether the US gets European tax information? What do you think they are going to do with it?
And what country do you think is "more reliable"? France, Sweden, Germany, etc.? Don't make me laugh. Their surveillance and espionage against their own citizens and each other has been known for decades.
When ask eu states are complicit in providing the nsa with data, gchq in particular
Here we go again.
France and Germany have been very close for a long time now. WWII is ancient history.
...of a network to exploit which is not subject to US regulation and controls currently being put into place with respect to their operations on domestic networks.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
How do you control VPNs and Onion routing without heavy filtering that can hardly be hidden?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
All hail the new EU central committee that will govern our lives.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
There is a third choice. Data pollution. What I really want is a program that doesn't require me to do it manually - entering in false "tags", random "birthdates", and randomly searching for consumer items I don't necessarily have interest in. Antiphorm was evidently a program developed to do something like this, but it disappeared.
Cookie camouflage, digital haystacks, bitshit, there must be a lot of names for it. Nature almost never evolves invisibility, but evolves camouflage. I haven't been able to interest any programmers in developing this, but think it could just be as simple as a browser hunting forms online and populating them with garbage.
"We all have a civil obligation to generate false data." - Spartacus, 71 BC
Gently reply
Good point :|
Who says the US doesn't create jobs overseas?
Hardly. All she wants is exclusive access for European agencies so they have more material to trade with.
...because a "pan European" anything isn't really going to be secure at all. All the NSA will have to do is pay someone in a financially desperate state to let them plug-in to their "secure" pan-European connection.
-Styopa
Internet routing doesn't respect geographical location. If you can't trust your internet connection even without knowing the route it takes, then you can't trust it at all. Everything must be encrypted.
Of course, our politicians don't actually want to protect our privacy; they just want to be the only ones listening.
Any Germany-only net ("national routing") would be about there, and it will come, but publicly expressing a desire for it would be quite an affront to the US. Dr Merkel would not want (also by heart, not only by reason) to do that. The notion of "Europe" reads much like "We are doing it, hope you get this large with us". I suspect, we will see a multi-level routing, and a general increased support of local networks down to private initiatives (as in freifunk.net) with anybody seeing only what they have to see. This way, there is also little noise expected from that English-speaking island just off the continent.
The notion of an European Initiative seeds some hope for synergies with the establishment of a pan-European power-grid. Seeing much high-tec in pan-European institutions like Airbus or the ESA, and with all those German car industries basically acting globally, to have any Germany-only effort can only be the seed of something larger.
What comes then? No-spy deals with Russia or China? What can governments offer to establish more mutual trust without deep access to IT infrastructure? Joint governance with active visitors to be involved in each others' political decision making? We need new ideas.
I would rather be spied in EU , by people I can vote against, protest against, or revolt against, rather than by the we-like-to-kill-people-with-the-wrong-metadata-with-drone spying bunch against which I do not vote, and have no chance to protest or revolt against.
So : "go europe ! Build that network and root server !". and "go fuck yourself US & ICANN".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
YES, IT IS POSSIBLE to obfuscate your online fingerprint into a chameleon-like polluting mess of data, but the "gurus" in this world who completely have a handle on the whole puzzle HAVE NO INTEREST in sharing every piece of the puzzle with you; it is in their interest to keep userland "fenced in" ....
Go to this website with your browser-----http://browserspy.dk/browser.php
All those result values are fingerprinting you (along with your IP address and MAC address) . ....
If you could make your browser randomly change EVERY ONE of those result values automatically at regular intervals, then you empower yourself with a chameleon-like internet fingerprint
BUT GUESS WHAT ... there is no Firefox addon or other browser plugin for doing this !!!!! ....
because, as I said before, the "gurus" in this world who completely have a handle on the whole puzzle HAVE NO INTEREST in sharing every piece of the puzzle with you; it is in their interest to keep userland "fenced in"
ALONG WITH THE ABOVE, you need to constantly inject customized "noise" (masses of text) into your web queries to mislead algorithms such as Google, NSA etc into making a customized profile of you.
This can be done in Firefox by using the addon 'TrackMeNot'-----http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
FINAL THOUGHTS:
All I have described is intended to totally empower userland.....BUT THIS DOES NOT SUIT organizations, companies and people whose business depends on shit like this and breaks their pretty little javascript-laced umblical cords connected to you.
Whenever Merkel makes a comment, I instantly wonder what her real intentions are. And this time it didn't take long, she wants control over what information is coming into her area of reign.
If she was honest about wanting the US spying to end she'd first of all ferret out and shut down the various spying locations still scattered across Germany. It's not like the US never had bases there or shut them all down...
It's not about spying but about getting caught at it. Everyone needs to get all up in arms while still letting the work go on behind the scenes. I would not be surprised in the EU nation's intelligence community has redoubled efforts to stop their own potential Snowdens from going public; or if they looked at what the US is dining and said "Damn. We need to get some of that capability as well..."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
They all spy. All this is for is to give government more control over their people, under the guise of 'privacy'.
If your 'local internet' is isolated, its pretty hard to see what the rest of the world is doing, or let the rest of the world see how badly you are treating your people.
"Digital Curtain"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The French have suggested "Project Maginot 2.0". They propose to build some really big firewall routers, here X, here X and here X. Take that USA! hah hah!
This will certainly fracture the internet. I can easily imagine other regions of the world not necessarily as friendly to their citizens as it is in Europe creating their own separate networks so few decades from now we will be locked to basically borders of our regions. I would rather put political pressure on US to stop snooping. EU can also easily develop independent cipher standards that do not have NSA backdoor and possibly even introduce email protocols that enforce those standards automatically thus preventing anyone from reading EU emails. That would do way more for the humanity than separating themselves.
"Whenever Merkel makes a comment, I instantly wonder what her real intentions are. "
Secrecy is not one of them, since she illegally used a private, unencrypted Party-cellphone to do state-business on.
A 12 year old could have listened in, no NSA or spy-sites needed.
Not concerned about privacy and blanket, warrant-less surveillance? Better hope that the algorithms the security agencies use to identify the "bad guys" are infallible.
As much as it pains me to observe this, but due to the 'special relationship' having the UK on board will mean that everything is tapped by the US anyhow.
These people are in la la land if they think they can build a giant communications network that the NSA wont be able to crack into.
"We must hold the just balance and set ourselves as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand, as
If she was honest about wanting the US spying to end she'd first of all ferret out and shut down the various spying locations still scattered across Germany. It's not like the US never had bases there or shut them all down...
Are you serious? Germany does not have the power to shutdown such locations. We are still being occupied by the U.S. military.
http://xkcd.com/576/
Don't bother pointing that out. Even most Americans have decided that America is a great but evil country, so no other democracies could possibly be doing anything as bad (let alone worse) as the uniquely evil NSA.
Germany's hypocrisy here would be hysterical if people didn't take what they said at face value.
The interesting thing is that (as far as I know) this won't stop the flow of metadata and intercepts towards the NSA. Why not? Well, I believe that each and every EU country has bilateral deals with the US to share raw data in bulk. The British, the French, the Dutch, the Danes, the Germans (!), the Italians, the Spaniards, and the Polish. And err who else matters over there?
They're doing this for approximately the same reason as Singapore and Korea do it: they need the assistance of the US. Read: their security services want intercept data from parts of the communication network they can't monitor but the US can. So they do a deal: they give the US the intercept data (and metadata) they have access to in return for intercept data they don't have access to.
Therefore metadata and intercepts from all over the globe will continue to flow towards the NSA with the consent of those EU countries. Germany included.
What might happen though is that they'll be able to negotiate a better deal with the US is they act together than by having a lot of bilateral deals.
Could someone please tell Merkel?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So the NSA has managed to balkanize the internet. Good job! The greedy data-grabbers have managed to get themselves cut off from Europe (ok that's what's planned). Some will argue "nah, that'll never happen", but just stop and look at GPS. The US government was on their high horse about "We will shut off GPS satellites as we see fit. US Generals will decide, European politicians get no say, no voice, are ignored completely". And European politicians said to their American counterparts "We depend on this for emergency needs, for shipping, transportation, safety", and got a reply: "meh". And so the Europeans built their own GPS satellite system, and the Americans said "We would like a kill-switch to shut off your system" and the European Politicians looked at the request of the American Politicians and Generals and said "meh". And now we see the NSA doesn't respect privacy, nor laws of other countries. They do whatever they want, having been given a blank cheque, green light by American Politicians, and European Politicians are saying to American Politicians "Privacy, Security", and the American Government, and Generals have replied "meh". Oh, and there won't be a European internet 'kill switch' the American Generals can push, and the Europeans are under no obligation to allow the Americans access, and they can use full quantum state cryptography or whatever else they decide the NSA cannot break. Sometimes trampling over other peoples rights is not such a good idea. The whole 'they are foreigners, they have no rights under US law' thing really needs to backfire.
Don't mention The War!
Merkel is from the former GDR, and is a prime example of what they used to call a "Wendehals" there - someone who will turn his head (and opinion) into whatever direction is favorable at the moment. Her ability to quickly adapt to public sentiment is what kept her in power so long (and the fact that she ruthlessly gets rid of potential competitors, by "promoting" them away and/or "waiting" for them to fall to some scandal or the other).
So I'll believe it when I see it and not a second earlier. Words are cheap.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Wouldn't this just actually work out to make it easier for the EU to spy on it's own citizens while keeping the NSA out of the loop?
Why yes, I'm cynical as hell, why do you ask?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The Internet is being killed by its own successes, and it deserves to die by fragmentation, and it will because of spying and how easy spying is on it. It has several single points of access by intelligence agencies and they can be made to work much harder to achieve their goals. At the same time this response will kill the business and spam schemes, and they deserve to die too. Death to Google and Facebook and lots of other organizations that have had to much power to intrude and manipulate. There are ways to make life hard on the bad guys, but you and I have to get used to different behavior in our networks to achieve this. We have to put up with delay in order to be safer, and we have to deal with less connectivity in order to be more private. This is the future.
You might think that fragmentation favors state censorship, and it will as long as the topology is as static as it is now at the large scale, but it doesn't have to be. What is needed is a way to have much more dynamic routing, so it is hard to determine, meshes and store and forward technology with acceptance of latency is one way to allow for that. Privacy and security for individuals may require the end of the always-on Internet and it may need delayed gratification for more precious content to reach its target securely and privately.
It is pretty hard to spy on the sneaker net. What if even our wired communications become more like sneaker nets?
Me too, with your own boys vetting you at least you understand the culture and the values. A concern with the current way of working is that as a European the NSA could decide that you're an enemy of the state and you'd be picked up at boarder control when trying to enter the USA; then you're over there with an almost impossible task of getting out. Nobody would know you've been picked up, you'd just disappear.