[governance] FW: [Dewayne-Net] The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back

[michael gurstein]

-----Original Message-----
From: listmom at warpspeed.com [mailto:listmom at warpspeed.com] On Behalf Of
Dewayne Hendricks
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2013 4:08 AM
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net - Sent by
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The US government has betrayed the internet. We need
to take it back

The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back The NSA
has undermined a fundamental social contract. We engineers built the
internet - and now we have to fix it By Bruce Schneier Sep 5 2013
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-in
ternet-nsa-spying>

Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us.

By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered
and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental
social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet
infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and
software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them
to be ethical internet stewards.

This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators
envisioned. We need to take it back.

And by we, I mean the engineering community.

Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires
political intervention.

But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things
engineers can - and should - do.

One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you
have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal
confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by
the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your
story. Your employer obligations don't cover illegal or unethical activity.
If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know.
We need whistleblowers.

We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting
routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud
systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I've just
started collecting. I want 50. There's safety in numbers, and this form of
civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.

Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to
prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent
communications intermediaries from leaking private information.

We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open
protocols, open implementations, open systems - these will be harder for the
NSA to subvert.

The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards
that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in
Vancouver. This group needs dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is
an emergency, and demands an emergency response.

Three, we can influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now,
and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical
steward of the internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are
legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need
to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder
for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to
demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and
corporations.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>

 


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