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Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Internet Has Become 'World's Largest Surveillance Network' (theinquirer.net)
An anonymous reader writes: Inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee said in an interview with The New York Times that the internet has become the "world's largest surveillance network. [...] It controls what people see. It creates mechanisms for how people interact. It's been great, but spying, blocking sites, repurposing people's content, taking you to the wrong websites completely undermines the spirit of helping people create," he said. Berners-Lee thinks large corporations and governments are to blame. "The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging." At the Decentralized Web Summit, Berners-Lee met with a group of internet activists to discuss ways of "re-decentralizing" the internet, and giving individuals more control while ensuring more privacy and security. "The temptation to grab control of the internet by the government or by a company is always going to be there," he said. "They will wait until we're sleeping, because if you're a government or a company and you can control something, you'll want it. You want to control your citizens or exploit customers. The temptation is huge. Yes, we can have things enshrined in law, but even then it won't necessarily stop people."
I seem to remember such an article a day or two ago wanting to recreate the Internet so governments couldn't control it. This is basically a dupe. It's also hopelessly idealistic.
Tell us something we don't know.
We've created a sprawling, interconnected network of immense capacity for storage and bandwidth which we use for nearly every necessary and unnecessary task in our lives. We fail to adequately encrypt the vast majority of our communications. We give our governments free rein to do with it what they please.
Is anyone actually surprised that the single greatest tool in human creation has also been the same thing which enables an extraordinary amount of basic human rights violations?
The irony is that criminal marketeers heavily utilize encryption, dark nets, etc., in order to avoid most surveillance. Law-abiding citizens are actually spied on more often than explicitly illegal organizations.
And some people think our governments should have backdoors to encryption algorithms? Get your heads out of your asses.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
Total control always leads to loss of control. Controlling consumer behaviour leads to ignorance of the consumer behaviour. Day's religious class is over. Happy weekend, disciples!
That's hilarious. You go right ahead and then come back and tell us your cool idea about a global infrastructure that can't be controlled by the organizations who build and maintain said infrastructure.
AC's law: "No network architecture, however robust against censorship and control it is designed to be, can survive first contact with a billion idiots who insist on using Facebook."
Yay Slashdot!
Governments are controlled by people with money, who also control the media. Those two groups ensure that unless you look really really hard, you get a reality that they want you to have. They people they want you to believe are "good" are painted that way, and anyone not playing for that team is vilified using all methods possible. An easy example is the constant claim that Trump is racist because he wants to have a functional border. I don't hear the Brits called "racist" because they control their border and prevent free entry for anyone who sneaks through. Trump has plenty of faults they could rationalize, but it is easier to use ad hominem. Funny how the same stories we hear here about Trump being racist are played out in Canada, the UK, Germany, Japan, etc..
There are few ways to fix the issues. One possible fix is to adjust slander and libel lawsuits which tend not to happen due to case law and stringent requirements. Fox news claiming "racist" is obviously quite different from you calling a person a name. People will attempt to claim that lies are proteced under the first amendment, which is simply not true.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
http://i.imgur.com/QLGyQYf.jpg
Everything new is compromised.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140124/10564825981/nsa-interception-action-tor-developers-computer-gets-mysteriously-re-routed-to-virginia.shtml
We build new things faster than we understand how to safely utilize them. Even when we understand, that doesn't mean it necessarily happens either.
Umm, it's because he was actually knighted in 2004!
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Brewster Kahle said that sentence at a conference also attended by TBL. And the quote doesn't even appear in the article that the phrase is linked to.
The actual quote is in the New York Time article:
“Edward Snowden showed we’ve inadvertently built the world’s largest surveillance network with the web,” said Mr. Kahle
Congratulations on failing journalism 101. But then, this being Slashdot and all: Congratulations! You're an editor!!
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Centralization keeps a set of standards that everyone uses. Without that, we would end up with a lot more embracing and extending that ends up breaking things. The US is far from perfect, but has been a pretty good steward of the internet. Instead of breaking the internet, we need laws about what data can be collected and how it can be used. The EU has such laws and it's probably a matter of time before the US does, too. An internet that's decentralized gives more opportunities for parts of the internet to not be free.
He has been awarded a knighthood for his services. It is recognised world wide as an honour, more so in commonwealth countries.
It is no more outdated than the US constitution and its numerous amendments, has a much longer history.
US attorneys continue to use "esq" (for esquire, who was an apprentice to a knight)
Wasn't that the point?
Yes Tim, this was the real-whole plan... just that you did not know on those times,
Thank you for your work, thruly yours CIA,FBI,NSA,the fucked goverments of the world, BigBro, and "Peña Grandson".
Knighted in another country, UK. So slashdot has also to prefix/suffix Japanese names as required (sama, sensei, heika...), French (Chevalier, Monseigneur...), ...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
All that aggressivity revealed through AC anonymity. Passive aggressive, hmm?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Yes, all Englishmen should be addressed as Sir by ignoble poltroons such as yourself.
Cause the submitter used the title and first paragraph of the article from the British theInquirer, which obviously will use English honorifics.
Governments and corporations didn't get to choose who monopolized the dark web yet somehow Silk Road still managed to rise to the top, AFAIK. People simply like one stop shopping, even when it comes to illicit goods and services apparently.
Brought to you by big government, corrupt democrats, and liberal marketing firms.
Yeah, when you say something dumb, you can correct the situation by making more stupid posts. I expect your original post will be modded from 0 to 5 any time now.
Obviously, it's good when the 'big children' start talking about this, in San Francisco, true and only home of the techno-hipster, no less. However, we already had a smaller conference about this, last year, in London: http://redecentralize.org/ and started taking a few modest steps. In spite of my mild snark (I dislike Old Street and Shoreditch as much, it's a privilege of being really, really old) the more, the merrier.
Earlier still, in 2005, we had this: https://www.junes.eu/wsfii-lon... which was more of a 'full stack' and broader discussion including, for example, alternative currencies (ripple, LETS, bitcoin wasn't around). I suggested at that time, semi seriously, that we just say 'goodbye port 80' and set up camp somewhere else away from the crap. Except that crap would eventually/certainly track us down.
This is not to blow trumpets, although I'm proud and happy that we started in on this sometime ago. What it is now, is to find a decentralised way to combine and integrate all these discussions including (one of my favourites) discussion about tools/approaches for platform cooperatives: http://platformcoop.net/, simple sound-bite, alternatives to Uber, Air BnB etc. There's a lot to do, policy, pharmacology (how systems combine well or do not), standards and governance, to start with.
That is, rather than the great and good creating another easily exploitable monolith with a couple of commercial search engines, we need (as Jeff Goldblum said) to make 'a whole lot of brand new mistakes' and hopefully something radically different. For a start, gopher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., anyone? Back to the future.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
George Orwell himself a veteran wrote 1984 in 1949 at a time when people had done it tough and fought for freedom.
He would be disgusted at today's simpering wimps who gave up their privacy without a fight.
It is true that governments (and international criminal structures) use surveillance. This is the reality. And there's no way around it.
However, good people are to learn using these tools too. We see already some examples how digital technologies allowed to demonstrate what had been hush-hush doubtful schemes for decades.
Forget about ending it, but learn to use it smartly (and legally) too.
Well, the Internet is the largest network for a great many things. Surveillance is just one of them. If it such a prominent and important function it says more about the people who are on it than about the network itself.
Its over and its lost. Its never going to happen. The only reason that what was known as the Internet in its early, more pure days existed was because it piggybacked off of a telecommunications network which was subject to strict regulation for other reasons. If none of that infrastructure had already existed and it was time to build the Internet again from scratch, there's no way in hell it would ever be open or free, and it will never be.
Maybe use amateur radio or something, but of course they can just jam that.
And on top of that, just to make sure you all understand who the internet really belongs to, control of DNS is handed over to ones who already control most of the content on the net anyway.
All those privacy-stealing EULAs? Yep, clicked right through so that people could play punch the monkey, or have an extra row of corn on their Facebook farm.
Lee needs to come off his high horse. It didn't "become" a surveillance network, the users made it into one.
We have obviously fallen short in terms of creating a government entity which is properly in check by the governed
That's because it's impossible. A man cannot volunteer himself to be subject to coercion (which is what the "social contract" theory boils down to), just as he cannot force another man to volunteer. That's because each of the two possible modes of human interaction, voluntary association and coercion, can only be explained as the mutually-exclusive negation of the other -- otherwise they wouldn't have meaning. The only exceptions are regarding those who lack either the capacity or the time to properly evaluate a human interaction, such as with minors, the mentally ill, or a person unaware of an immediate danger, such as an individual being tackeled out of the path of a bus.
This is the same Sir Tim Berners-Lee who pushed so fucking hard to include DRM in HTML5 because these same big companies were throwing money at him.
Better than being actively stupid.
Cryptome phrased this nicely a few years ago:
So what? We have even better data-transmission infrastructure in place today. The hardware isn't the issue, the issue is how it's used. We could encrypt and onion-route everything if we really wanted to, and make it difficult for anyone to track people's activity through their ISPs.
But that doesn't address the problem being discussed - the fact that people have voluntarily handed control over their internet experience to a small handful of large corporations. Doesn't matter how invisible your path is, if at the end everyone says "Hey Facebook/Google/Twitter, it's me. Pander to me and sculpt my information exposure as you see fit". For that we need decentralized information services.
I seem to recall there being a open-source distributed Facebook-esque program circulating a few years back, perhaps with the increasing evidence of nigh-ubiquitous surveillance and manipulation it's time to revisit that idea.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That seems simplistic and poorly considered. Very little is black or white, life is painted almost exclusively in shades of grey.
The social contract: You choose to join a club with certain rules - so you voluntarily subject yourself to those rules in order to join, as well as whatever coercion is associated with enforcing them (expulsion? humiliation? death?). A voluntary transaction where you choose to surrender a measure of your freedom of action in exchange for the benefits of belonging to the club. Change your mind, and you can leave the club. Changing nations is a bit more difficult, but hardly impossible. There's even "nations" out there with no functioning government. Generally not places that most people would choose to live, but if your unrestrained freedom is that important to you, go nuts. Just be ready for others to try to wield their own unrestrained freedom against you. Without a social contract, my right to swing my fist ends where I say it ends, and keeping your face out of its path is your business.
But that doesn't directly address the government being held in check by the governed. In that situation, barring a direct democracy where everyone votes on every government action, it seems to me you must essentially have two clubs: The government, which makes the rules for the populace, and the populace, which makes the rules for the government. To join the government you must voluntarily subject yourself to an even greater limitation of personal freedom in exchange for gaining additional power. In principle that's perfectly feasible, in practice... it seems the government always ends up in the position of policing itself, which is obviously unsustainable.
Still, we can at least conceive of an arrangement where there's an independent system of rule-creation and enforcement imposed on the government by the citizenry. Oversight juries perhaps, filled by a rotating cast of randomly selected citizens? Give them nigh-unlimited investigatory power over government officials (24-7 surveillance?), as well as the power to unilaterally mete out punishments to such officials as they see fit. Perhaps with a similar, possibly larger, rotating group in charge of creating and modifying the rules officials must adhere to.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
See subject: That'd be my guess - Subs/U-Boats & no sonar to detect them...
APK
P.S.=> @ least not initially on sonar detection of attacking submerged subs - best they had was mines vs. them iirc... apk
It's tough for the 'little people' to be heard on equal footing when permanent addresses ( IPV4 / IPV6 ) are controlled by 'registration authorities'.
Everyone should be allowed to automatically take an IPV6 address from the global pool and register it in DNS without having to use your network service providers block of addresses.
Network service providers limit home connections 'upload' speeds to prevent average people from monetizing or serving at 'business speeds' . This means that only large corps who have enough money to buy their own blocks of address space are allowed onto the actual playing field.
The problem is really that of ownership of infrastructure. If people want a freedom internet the infrastructure control needs to be removed from vested interests while improving or equalizing service speeds for the average person. As long as your connection is dependent on a service provider your connection can never really be freedom-ish at all. Your data flows through them.
Maybe use amateur radio or something, but of course they can just jam that.
Amateur Radio?
Hello, you all have a wifi router in your home. Your phones have wifi. Same with your tablets. If you live in a city, or really any neighbourhood, you can scan and see dozens or many many more wifi routers that are not your own. All we need to do is turn them into routers/repeaters.
Some day the populous will wake up and see this free massive bandwidth for what it is... an alternate and independent network that cannot be controlled. It moves with the people and at their discretion.
I can't wait for this future.
Umm no. Wifi goes through their wires. And they can detect and control anything that goes through them. They may allow things like the dark web to exist but then with the flip of a switch they can also cut it off. That is a far cry from freedom.
You are right. It is not an idea to solve all the problems the poster mentions.
All communication can be blocked. I am suggesting that people use property that they own in the manner which they desire. I am not advocating a network using the property of other parties such as routers owned by the ISP or phones owned by telecommunication companies. Software that works on routers and phones owned by a company would probably be in violation of their policies even though their customers would probably enjoy such modifications.
I am referring to most local communication using property owned by the individual. Communications such as text and telephone calls and local web page requests to restaurants, theatres and services you use in your own community. I believe it is possible to use existing technology with altered software to route local traffic. Especially since most routers are not being fully utilized by their owners most of the time. The software would be something like DD-WRT where the user would install software to support local traffic protocols.
I am not advocating theft. I think if the additional services of this network were unavailable to users of routers and phones owned by companies, then the consumer would decide whether that limitation is sufficient for way in which they want to use the their networks. Let the market decide.
I think this sort of network would support the majority of my communication traffic. Local traffic. The kind of traffic I may want to be more decentralized and have features such as security and privacy.
I believe there are some tests of this sort of thing already, but I think it should be accelerated, because as a minimum the ISP's need more competition.
And finally, such an alternative network would provide ad-hock support in times of emergency. Centralized network systems could be useless in situations such as floods, earthquakes and similar.
What's the difference between a "local" network and one that is not? It all owned and controlled by the same people.
Yes you could try to go out and lay your own wires, but they would rip them up faster than you could lay them.
We are fucked and there's no hope.