Internet Is Easy Prey For Governments 314
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Douglas Rushkoff writes on CNN that the revolution in Egypt starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away. 'Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points,' says Rushkoff adding that when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the US the very same government authority was used to cut off "enemies of the state" from access and funding. Rushkoff suggests that we use the lessons of the internet to build a communications infrastructure that cannot be controlled from the top. Back before the internet, many early computer hobbyists networked on Fidonet, a simple peer-to-peer network and now digital activists propose reviving such ideas with mesh networking over Wi-Fi networks that could connect inhabitants of an entire city without anyone having an internet service provider. 'Until we choose to develop such alternative networks, our insistence on seeing the likes of Facebook and Twitter as the path toward freedom for all people will only serve to increase our dependence on corporations and government for the right to assemble and communicate.'"
Juxtaposition (Score:4, Insightful)
Amusing story coming right above one lauding the benefits of U.S. government regulation over the internet.
HF (Score:1, Insightful)
Shortwave radio is unstoppable.
No ideal solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as people complain about some government/company having the ability to do 'something', completely decentralized systems are also subject to wide spread abuse that is nearly impossible to stop. Think about the proposed "mesh" networking - you traffic goes through who knows whom's device, your IP address comes from where? Your DNS queries come from who knows where? If I can feed you your IP address and DNS results and your data passes through my network - then I own you. Witness what has happened with even fairly simply systems such as SMTP. The world is inundated with SPAM because the system in inherently decentralized and it is impossible to verify where email is coming from. Put all your network traffic through a decentralized system and no one is going to be happy with the results. You think SPAM is bad? You've not seen anything compared to what would happen if you could not say where your IP/DNS/Traffic is from.
Bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shutting down US would be harder (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? If they got Comcast and Sprint/AT&T to shut down service, that would pretty much cut off the entire state that I'm in. Are you up for traveling hundreds of miles to get to that "competing" service provider during some sort of a major national event?
Re:Bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the first job in any coup? (Score:3, Insightful)
Controlling mass media.
Seize and hold the newspapers, the radio stations and TV stations. That has been the highest priority for every faction coup, revolution or uprising, pro or contra, for the last century. The Internet is just a newer medium but the same principle applies. Today you don't just occupy newsrooms, printshops, broadcast towers and satelite uplinks but NOCs or DSL concentrators too, that's all.
And as for the much talked about "Internet kill switch", that is a red herring which is so dead, it smells rather awful by now. "Physical access trumps everything" and whoever has the power has this access. Network admins are not known for owning, and using, weapons om an effective way.
Nothing to see here, move along citizen.
Right to speak and assemble? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What, no ad hoc radio internet? (Score:4, Insightful)
All sorts of ways of going around The Man and Big Telco exist(802.11i and pre-standard variants, AX.25 links, RONJA setups, more or less jury-rigged fiber runs between buildings, 802.11A/B/G/N directional antenna links, etc.) Trouble is, without some critical mass of users, you either have nobody to talk to and/or make yourself fairly visible to the hypothetical repressive authorities.
As with internet anonymity schemes like Tor and Freenet, so long as just using the comcast line is cheaper and easier, getting Joe User onboard is going to be a challenge. Should the situation change suddenly(as in Egypt) Joe will have a hard time getting onboard at the last moment. Most of the 'internet-alternative' stuff is much easier to buy and set up when you have internet access...
Perhaps a more serious problem, longer term, is that shutting down the internet is a very crude solution, one that smart authoritarians are going to want to avoid: Why cut off a major business tool and supply of soothing porn and entertainment? Why push activists off a medium that feels anonymous(but is comparatively easy to tap and monitor programmatically) and onto a wide variety of ad-hoc solutions, many of which will have to be chased down by your street-level jackboots and creepy HUMINT types one by one? The capabilities of malicious actors to keep the internet functioning almost perfectly, while compromising or blocking undesired material are only going to increase as time goes on.
Re:PANs and sneakernets (Score:4, Insightful)
Any government with a modern military (Score:5, Insightful)
Could do a lot worse than cutting Internet access. But if they are just after your mesh network, they could just jam it our cut out electrical power until laptop batteries drain. You can not solve a human problem using only technological measures. Any government powers sufficient to catch and prosecute crooks is also sufficient to abuse ordinary citizens. The only answer is democratic oversight and population educated enough to use it effectively.
Re:It doesn't have to be that way ... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for seeing Facebook and Twitter as a path for 'freedom of the people' ... well that just makes you sound like a freaking idiot. Neither of these sites provide anything that wasn't already done before them on the Internet as well in more traditional methods. Old idea, new theme, new fad ... not a world changer.
I tend to disagree, what with millions of people congregated around the same services. Most people I know (personal experience, not scientific) check their Facebook 10-20 times a day compared to once a day (if that) for e-mail. Those who tweet, tend to tweet often. Yes, message boards, newsgroups, mailing lists, and so on were around long before this, but I don't think there were ever this many people on one unified service that is used near-ubiquitously.
Re:It doesn't have to be that way ... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's actually quite a bit more complicated than that. The Internet as we know it has a minimum of three "choke-points" that prevent the Internet from ever being a fully distributed network:
1. Backbones, which are so incredibly expensive to deploy and maintain that only governments and large telecommunications companies can afford to have them. Mesh networks are by definition much slower and and more inefficient than a star-topology network and cannot scale globally given current state of the art in technology. And if they could, there's a whole world of reliability and security questions to be answered.
2. DNS. In theory, DNS can be decentralized when zone authorities don't overlap. In practice, almost everybody "subscribes" only to the root zone, which is controlled by ICANN.
3. IP address space. IPs are assigned by central authorities, to ISPs, and then to users. All of this is tracked and logged somewhere, so your IP is effectively your signature around the net, even if the IP changes frequently. When my web server logs a page view from a given IP address at a given time, there's a very good chance that I could root out the specific human behind that mouse click given enough motivation and/or money and/or influence. Point is, if you can be tracked, you can be censored or otherwise denied access to the network.
Radio will never be an acceptable way to route around physical Internet connections permanently because the bandwidth is inherently much lower. And even if it wasn't, the ability to communicate with any decent distance requires a license which happens to be granted by the government. The license comes with content restrictions as well (only non-commercial traffic is allowed, no obscene language, etc).
Replacing the Internet as it currently stands is not feasible. The only logical way to keep the Internet open and free in the long term is to demand from our governments laws which guarantee online privacy, freedom of speech, and bona-fide net neutrality at the same time that we invest in tools and technologies that empowers users to protect themselves.
Re:Juxtaposition (Score:5, Insightful)
Amusing story coming right above one lauding the benefits of U.S. government regulation over the internet.
I assume you're talking about an article on net neutrality. I think most supporters of net neutrality in the US also oppose the US President having an "Internet kill switch," and these two positions are consistent.
There's a principle, in classic liberalism, of dividing up authority so that every authority is limited -- most famously, there are the "checks and balances" of the three branches of the US government, but I believe the principle goes well beyond that. The democratic principle is that the ultimate authority is the citizenry, and that is limited by the principle of civil rights, in which there are individual rights that are not to be taken away. The thing to be guarded against is unchecked power, in any hands.
The point of the FCC regulating ISPs to enforce a policy of "net neutrality" is a check on corporate power, but it isn't a grant of unlimited authority over the Internet to the FCC. An Internet kill switch does sound like unlimited authority over the Internet.
Re:Juxtaposition (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a question of checks and balances on powers. Like any social structure, the government can be a powerful force of good so long as there is a way to watch the watchers. However, the more central oversite you have, the more fragile the entire network becomes. What is clear from this incident is that old proverb that "the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it" is dead wrong - as a communication medium, the Internet can be functionally crippled within a region by poking just a few corporations.
What this has me thinking about is what equipment should I add to my disaster kit to enable me to participate in assembling an ad-hoc community network in the event that the Internet is not available due to natural disaster or deliberate disruption.
Lets kill facebook! Here is how: (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't stand it... I'm going to help plant the seed since its taking too long and I'm busy (and can't see profit which I need more of today than goodwill.)
Facebook is a walled garden. Unlike some other closed companies they will try to interconnect to survive as well as create as much lock in as possible but these APIs and contracts are purely business related and therefore are limited in their scope and adaptability (obviously the choke point is an issue.)
This isn't microsoft, its merely a contact system with idiot proofed 'home pages' and addictive web games. Twitter is in a much better position; but it too is at risk for open or distributed alternatives (think if your email all had to go through hotmail.com how long that would have lasted... but today we are just fine with this??)
An open set of protocols and secure IDs would provide a flexible completely open alternative to the centralized proprietary network. We could develop an application layer social internet to mirror how the internet killed off the private networks and their networking stacks. Facebook might live as a search engine / directory for these IDs like how google helps you find URLs - but it won't be the only place like it is now.
I see something akin to openID but with PGP, GPG keys as well as contact and identification data available; each bit of data being encrypted with different keys. Your ID could float around openly and freely without the associated data and you could search for it among many catalogs and interlinking services -- plus private facebook like services - but you've be able to migrate or incorporate other services without deals between facebook and others. My email can be made public and people can find me but naturally it has spam issues - but I'm not talking about having open contact data with the IDs-- a high school can list student IDs without other data and your app can discover the connections.
Sure there are privacy issues; not much worse than already being dealt with behind closed doors - security by obscurity (that is, obscure because you can't see inside facebook like you can an open system.) Governments likely are building/have social connection linking systems in addition to easy access to cutting edge corporate systems.
The problem with email was spam; its a messaging system not a "permanent" reference like many people's cell phone number has become. This is where I'm not so keen on OpenID either... There are multiple issues each needing some serious thinking and design work-- unique IDs separate from your verified identity - search engines could find the ID over the web and you can find the ones who are the person-- they accept you and you've got a private social network which can securely be formed within that group to share data. I guess I'm for long numeric IDs like phone numbers; we can remember those.... besides you have directories to help find the numbers and if you place that number around with your name enough the connection will be made outside a formal 'networking' system. At least then I can see this John Doe is not that John Doe because their IDs differ (or he changed IDs losing all the benefits.) This lets you stamp things with your ID-- sure it can be faked-- let it! Authentication issues would be separated and optional.
lots of options... john.doe.3546871 for example (ignoring changing names) but not to tie your ID to a 3rd party name like facebook.com, country, etc. duplicates are possible; can't avoid that-- its distributed and open- but since authentication is a side issue it doesn't matter. Your legal full name hasn't been good enough for generations already. Perhaps a simple string format... with recommendations on picking a more unique name (yet another service somebody could provide.)
Multiple RFCs needed. Many creative uses are possible with multiple loosely coupled aspects of such a system. email integration means no facebook email; IM too; games too; authentication systems integration; certificate and domains; dating services; address/ema
Re:No ideal solutions (Score:2, Insightful)
And if you're a subscriber of an even remotely big ISP, odds are good you're helping paying for the hosting, transmission, and receiving of CP both directly (intentional, encrypted or unencrypted) and indirect (unintentional, through other users hosting freenet, tor-nodes, etc) as part of ISP oversubscription. But, then, that's in the same realm as being responsible for civilian "collateral damage" (ie, civilian deaths) because you pay your taxes and your government is waging an armed conflict in some fashion. It just happens to feel a lot more real and relevant when you're closer to the immoral acts.
Or, put another way, if you feel so guilty about what might be improbably be done through your computer, how can you justify paying someone else in part for their computers which helps ensure it will almost certainly be done? It's in the same realm of paying someone else to host a freenet node regardless of whether you ever personally use a remote web proxy to access it?
My point isn't that there's no moral difference but merely that the morality of the situation as a whole is rather unclear.
Re:Juxtaposition (Score:5, Insightful)
What worries me most is that political discourse in the US is diluted down to a series of maxims, which are largely not only incorrect, but actively damaging to the nation. Cutting taxes is not always good, nor is regulation always bad. It's time people should think about the issues in a more nuanced manner and start to appreciate (and understand) the amount of complexity and difficulty in these issues.
Re:Juxtaposition (Score:5, Insightful)
The other article is about government regulation to reduce restrictions on internet access, not to impose them.
And if you are fool enough to believe with the mechanism in place it will not be used for other things... well then I have a whole shelf of history books to sell you that might make you think twice about power granted never being used or expanded upon.
Doubly so with the very same government snuffing out domain names, the next step of course would be to mandate ISP's not allow routing to those addresses either...
Is that so impossible to see coming down the very path you are helping lay the flagstones for?
The funny thing that I am complaining about a hypothetical yet realistic threat; while Net Neutrality seeks to impose regulation to solve a problem we not only have not had but have no signs of having soon.