Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Internet Has Become 'World's Largest Surveillance Network' (theinquirer.net) 92
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."
this is essentially a dupe (Score:1, Insightful)
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 (Score:1)
It IS a dupe. Both stories link to the same NYT article. Lousy editing, for sure.
Re: this is essentially a dupe (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
Its over. Its lost (Score:1)
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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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How to govern the goverment? (Score:2)
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. C
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That would only deal with half the problem. Less than half, really. And, although I agree with your point about end to end encryption, there's already a solution to that, in the form of VPNs.
The commercialization of the web, and the advertising-based economic model these commercial entities adopted, are the bigger problem in terms of spying. I think the best thing we can do on our end is make advertising, and therefore data collection, unprofitable. We can do this by blocking ads and trackers, and blocking
Would not change anything (Score:1)
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 bo
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I don't claim Trump is racist because he wants a functional border. I claim Trump is racist because he is racist. As for the border controls, comparing what he wants to what Britain has is apples and oranges: we have strong border controls not just for stopping people but to stop notifiable diseases like rabies and Dutch Elm. If you want really stringent border control, look at Australia.
One big difference between the racists with a public platform here is that they don't have around half of the popular vot
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People will attempt to claim that lies are protec[t]ed under the first amendment, which is simply not true.
Feel free to point out any part of the amendment that allows for your exception. And while you're snooping around, take a glance at history [mentalfloss.com].
There is no requirement that you believe lies. Take your quest for censorship elsewhere.
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Involuntary restriction of speech is censorship.
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Oh, sorry. And you didn't answer the question. What restrictions on speech are contained in the 1st Amendment?
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Now, if we did away with the stupid Citizens United "corporations are people" concept, then you'd have an argument. Let's hold corporations 100% accountable for lies, freedom of speech has no relevance. Hell, we don't even need to go that far - we could make a much more targetted law that any organization that claims to be "news" must not knowingly make any false claim, explicitly or implicity (Is Sanders the antichrist?) As it stands now though, we actually have court precedent stating that news agencie
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It's an interview with the man who created "the internet". It is completely relevant and accurate.
I don't use "the one" search engine, I don't use "that" social network (or any of them for that matter) and I don't Tweet because what I had for breakfast just isn't that important to anyone but me. I host my own web and mail servers and I make a living by creating actual _products_ (what a novel idea, huh?). I am doing my part to keep MY internet within my control and I stay away from the Johnny-come-lately, e
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Careful, you might accidentally cut someone with all of that edge.
I'm a line here in Flatland, you insensitive clod.
Not really surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I haven't.
So, in short, you don't vote at all?
Because that's what you're saying.
Or you're being a hipster douche who damned well does understand how representative governments work, but wants to be 2edgy.
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A bit disingenuous. You don't vote on issues; you vote for parties who represent your vote and take predictable actions (ie they want you to vote for them next time too). No parties have come out against encryption restrictions, and therefore you're voting FOR encryption restrictions.
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you vote for parties who represent your vote
That's the theory. Haven't you noticed that Democracy is broken? Besides, things like the PATRIOT act were a) never part of an election platform and b) received overwhelming BIPARTISAN support. So that theory of yours...
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> That's the theory. Haven't you noticed that Democracy is broken? Besides, things like the PATRIOT act were
> a) never part of an election platform and b) received overwhelming BIPARTISAN support. So that theory of
> yours...
You've given an example of something with bipartisan support which is exactly what I did with support for laws clamping down on the use of encryption so that didn't really bring anything much to the table.
If you look you'll probably find both parties in the US stated they'd "pro
Re:Not really surprising. (Score:5, Interesting)
Geez, Tim Berners-Lee specifically mentions big companies, and Slashdot posters ignore Facebook and Google and the like and start ranting about government.
This is my total lack of surprise.
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Spying is spying, regardless of whether it comes from a state entity, corporation, or NGO.
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You mentioned the government as the surveilling force twice and said nothing about corporations. Sorry that I took that to mean that you were singling out government; how could I have misread you so?
Secondly, if you're going for a semantic escape: didn't you notice that there are multiple comments in the entire discussion ranting about government and that I specifically used 'Slashdot posters' in the plural? Why do you think I was targeting you specifically and not using your post as a jumping-off point for
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If you didn't intend to reply to me specifically, then perhaps you should not have replied to a specific post. The button says "Reply to This", not "Use this as a jumping-off point", so I'm sure you can understand why I would think you are directing your reply to me.
Cheers.
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Oh, aren't we a whiny little git.
You don't want people to say something about your utterances, keep your mouth shut in public.
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Starting your own comment chain would have avoided "whiny little gits" altogether. You like chiming in because it gives you the opportunity to call people cutesy names or thinly- or un-veiled insults, without actually providing anything substantive to the discussion.
I won't be reading any further replies here. You've already wasted too much of my time.
Cheers.
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Use Tails like Snowden BUT (Score:1)
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
Re:Use Tails like Snowden BUT (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if you could have made your links clickable. Perhaps sir Berners-Lee could suggest a way?
Headline is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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!!
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Yes, you're right that Tim didn't say the quote the headline attributes to him. The man who organized the conference Tim attended did. However, Tim did talk about snowden, the surveillance state, and that it is undermining human rights. Even though the quote isn't attributed to him, the general idea and why he was at the conference is established in that sentence. I'm not really defending that they mislabeled it. But, Tim probably doesn't mind the headline, because it gets across the general idea of what he
Yes Tim... (Score:1)
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".
Conference in London 2015, joining the threads (Score:3)
Earlier still, in 2005, we had this: https://www.junes.eu/wsfii-lon... [junes.eu] 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/ [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/... [wikipedia.org], anyone? Back to the future.
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Someone just needs to build a router that connects you via Tor or some known secure VPN channel automatically that people can plug in to their existing routers and then build a new network within that.
The problem right now is that doing all that is too hard for the layperson, and even for people that know, many can't be arsed. Give people a box they can just plug in, and then plug in devices when they want this free version of the internet as opposed to the broken version and I suspect it'll get adopted qui
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giving a taste of their own medicine (Score:2)
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.
The DNS business and System Design are the Problem (Score:2)
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 ha