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."

Comments

this is essentially a dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: this is essentially a dupe

[saloomy]

It doesn't make the topic any more or less import. Surveillance is one of the defining constructs of the Information Age, and "answering that question" / "solving that problem" is going to have huge ramifications for the next century, or longer. It's on part in my opinion as to weather America should have entered WWII.

IMHO, surveillance is no less than the end to personal control and self determination on so many levels. What you can discover, you can mitigate. Imagine if England has this sort of power in the 1770's, the world would be vastly different today. We have obviously fallen short in terms of creating a government entity which is properly in check by the governed, free from abuse or corruption, so it's significantly dangerous to endow such an organization with both the power to see everything and do anything they want to about it.

Then you have the crime factor, theft of that data and abuse of power by those in the position to abuse that information (I'm looking at you Comcast & AT&T). Sir Tim is right. We need make commonplace and standard tomorrow, end to end encryption as TCP/IP is today. Nothing else can guarantee us our liberties with regards to it.

Not really surprising.

[Onuma]

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.

Re:Not really surprising.

[Dunbal]

We give our governments free rein to do with it what they please.

Er no, governments give THEMSELVES free reign to do what they please. When was the last time you voted on privacy laws? I haven't.