Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is

[bemildred]

This.

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The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.

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They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again.

And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, had to say on the matter recently. "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on," she said, "they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/28/edward-snowden-death-of-internet

[cantbeserious]

1. Thank You For Sharing

eom

[napoleon_in_rags]

2. I was thinking about that yesterday. What constitutes global communication?

What constitutes communication with a terrorist. Specifically, if I post something on a public forum like this, and a terrorist in Yemen reads it, am I communicating with terrorists? Is therefore every major journalist also doing the same, and what are the ramifications of that? If that means bad thing for me, than the sub-nets this article talks about already have appeal: I want to post on sites where my words won't be read by terrorists, which means the sites need to block off foreign countries, even individuals. But there goes the freedom of the Internet.

[bemildred]

3. Don't get me started about the bizarre uses being made of English.

I was talking about these problems back in June here with some other long-timers. It's all going to change, the internet was built on trust, when that's gone, it's gone too. There is nothing technical that compels one to connect to us, or to anybody else. You can throttle the connection down any way you like, people are already doing it. I've run private nets connected to the Internet, it's nothing, as much or as little as you like.

So yeah, at a minimum a long fight to get it back the way it is now. Maybe never. Of course, that will not go over well with the public, either. So more political strife.

It has also occurred to me that this could affect economic affairs globally in unpredictable ways. There is a lot of cash sloshing around on the web these days. What happens there? What about globalization? It's a witches brew.

Peachy.

[KoKo]

14. I understand...wonder about that myself...issues we need to think about..

and that's what Snowden and other Whistleblowers can give us. Thinking about things we didn't know about...and now that we know...what does it mean? And, what do we think we should do about it...if, anything.

[rhett o rick]

4. The internet is the biggest threat to tyranny. They have lots of resources to

squash the free internet. At some point we will fight back. Not sure what we are waiting for.

[snappyturtle]

5. I think Balkanization is a great idea. I'm in my mid 60's.

The reason that I tell you that is when I was young the thought of
visiting other countries and experiencing different cultures was a
dream waiting to happen. Fortunately, I got to do a little of that before the
the seemingly entire world became so homogenized, and in my thinking,
less intriguing. IMHO it's time the vast cultures of the world escaped
from the sameness to intrigue future generations. I love diversity but
so much of it has been lost in globalization....and that's a shame. again, imho.

[cascadiance]

6. And the Cloud IS the big topic in the tech world now... It was at OSCON this last week!

Just about every vendor in the exhibit hall and many of the session topics were around building out the cloud and cloud services, and various techniques to massage large amounts of data.

So there's a lot on the line where the tech world is investing its future now in terms of what happens in these areas of domestic spying. We really need to get a public forum to get the right rules laid down and ones that we all as citizens and potential customers of products and services relying on the internet need to trust.

[bemildred]

9. +1. nt

[starroute]

7. The problem is that everybody wants to control it in their own way

Countries like China or Iran want to control what their own citizens can see. The United States doesn't much care what Americans read -- they just want to read it over their shoulders. Some of the Islamic countries would like to make insulting the Prophet on the Internet a global crime. And the media companies want to turn in into television and use it to sell people streaming movies -- with lots of DRM thrown in.

In other words, nobody can be trusted and nobody has our interests at heart. The Internet should be part of the commons and be owned by none and for the benefit of all. But how we get there from here is the puzzle.

[karynnj]

8. What's next -- a claim that ARPA had this all planned out as a trap when they created the ARPAnet

that after many years was transformed into the internet?

It was originally a US military research tool to connect the government with contractors and universities.

[bemildred]

10. PRISM killing overseas cloud computing business

Previously, i suggested keeping an eye on user generated tech publication ars technica as an early warning source on the commercial impact of U.S. snooping and the Snowden revelations on cyber spying. Sorry to say, they’re right on top of a 10% cancellation rate for overseas cloud computing contracts. We will be fortunate is this is it. More likely, the seeds of distrust have been laid and will grow until the Congress kicks some serious ass and puts a leash on NSA.

That won’t be enough, however. Look at this slide. It shows the Prism snooping program adoption times for major tech firms. They were more than happy to go along with the foolishness of Obama and General Alexander of NSA in this invasion of privacy. The Republicans say, run the government like a business. Well, I say run the government and big business like a business and do it right. That would mean summarily removing General Alexander as NSA chief and retiring uber blowhard Steve Balmer as the head of Microsoft. These people have managed to create the perfect storm of arrogance, stupidity, and disregard for business relationships. They don’t care. They don’t have to. They have job security for life.

http://agonist.org/prism-killing-overseas-cloud-computing-business/

[Sunlei]

11. whats to stop some clever person to send up a sat. and offer Global wi-fi?

The internet is a Global public road, everyone in the world has a right to use that road.sunlei 2013

On top of that I want access to foreign isp services, access to use personal banks in other countries. NZ and Australias savings accounts pay 2-3% interest and no fees. The USA traps citizens and forces us to use USA services.

On top of that- Americans should have the freedom to buy RX drugs from outside countries. Plenty of first world countries have cheaper rx drugs. The drug corps LOBBY keep saying, "those drugs aren't safe". That's a bullshit statement to force Americans to acept price gouge . If those rx drugs are good enough for Canadians and UK, that's safe enough for me.

To hell with politicans who want to micro-control the USA society just to profit off us and OUR federal/state funds.

[bemildred]

12. Tech firms squirm over their role in Prism surveillance

The disclosures about the National Security Agency's massive global surveillance by Edward Snowden, the former information-technology contractor who's now wanted by the U.S. government for treason, is hitting the U.S. high-tech industry hard as it tries to explain its involvement in the NSA data-collection program.

Last week, a gaggle of 22 large U.S. high-tech firms—including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo which have acknowledged they participate in NSA data-gathering efforts in some form, if not exactly as Snowden and some press reports have described it—begged to be freed from the secrecy about it in their pleading, public letter to President Obama, NSA director Keith Alexander, and a dozen members of Congress.

The July 18 A letter from America's high-tech powerhouses, which was also signed by almost three dozen nonprofit and trade organizations as well as six venture-capital firms, begged for "greater transparency around national security-related requests by the US government to Internet, telephone, and web-based service providers" in terms of how much information the government demands on high-tech customers and subscriber accounts and how.

The letter begged for the U.S. government to make the amount of requests the government makes related to national security for individual customer information public.

http://www.techhive.com/article/2045391/tech-firms-squirm-over-their-role-in-prism-surveillance.html

[WillyT]

13. K & R !!!