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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."
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?
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?
I wonder if you could have made your links clickable. Perhaps sir Berners-Lee could suggest a way?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
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.
Is this a joke? The problem is centralization giving extraordinary power to a subset of individuals, governments, and companies. Internet users have chosen to take the shit they could do on their own before and instead do it within facebook's ecosystem and twitter's ecosystem. Why? And almost every site out there is also in FB's, Google's, and various ad company's ecosystems, where they have voluntarily added snippets of JavaScript/whatever to every damn page on the Internet. It's amazing what we have done to destroy what started out as a decentralized blank canvas. It does need a reset and not just for privacy reasons.
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!
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.