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

369 点作者 teawithcarl将近 12 年前

15 条评论

peterkelly将近 12 年前

If anything, I think this should be a wakeup call for those of us who have the capability to change things. I'm not talking about lobbying or raising attention to the issue, but the technical challenges of designing a network that is immune to all forms of surveillance. Let's treat this as an issue of computer science, not politics.Now I'm not claiming that this will be easy (and it may not even be possible), but this whole episode has made me seriously reconsider my long-term career direction in terms of the type of research I want to be doing. Pioneers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn created the "Internet 1" so to speak, and everything since then has been building on that. There's been plenty of projects that have worked towards getting around these surveillance measures (Tor for example), and I think we need more things like this.We need to fundamentally rethink the design of the Internet, because the current design is broken. Just like TCP/IP provides the infrastructure to abstract over different networking technologies and physical links (and the failure/slowness of individual links), we need something that abstracts over the basic, unencrypted (or encrypted but subject to centralised sabotage, like SSL) communication layer. Something that third parties can't intercept, at least not with anything like the ease with which they do today. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, that email is still unencrypted by default, and we don't have public-key cryptography built in to every mail client and turned on by default.Most importantly, we need more distribution, and to stop relying on centralised service providers, who are necessarily subject to the laws of the country in which they operate (see: recent articles discussing impacts of the issue on US cloud firms operating in foreign markets). Facebook should be a protocol, not a service. Twitter should be a protocol, not a service. And so forth. This of course completely upends the business model these technologies are based on, and would need to be approached by people with a completely different perspective.I certainly don't have the answers to these questions. But it's made me curious and it's something I'll be giving a great deal of thought to in the coming years.As Albert Einstein once said: "We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them".

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acabal将近 12 年前

From talking to some non-tech people about this, I have a dim view of the possibility that Snowden's revelations will change anything on a political level. People seem to either not care about the power the NSA has over them, or think Snowden is a traitor that deserves death and that's enough to invalidate anything he might have revealed. Society forgets history--generations of born-here Americans have never lived in a totalitarian state, and thus don't have the frame of reference to understand why the NSA's power could lead to grave harm.But I still do have hope, and the community at HN exemplifies it. Even if politics and society won't change enough to prevent further spying (or, on the scale of decades, a worse NSA-fueled catastrophe), at least all the smart techies of the world are growing aware, getting outraged, and getting organized over what's been revealed. In many ways, our real control over technological progress is the best we can ask for.If you know how to program, if you're thinking about learning, if your business depends on the internet, or if you're otherwise in a position to create technology of any flavor: the responsibility is on you--on us--to shape the internet and future technology in a way that will protect humanity's privacy and civil rights for generations to come.

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MarcScott将近 12 年前

Nobody outside the HN community seems to care about the Summer of Surveillance. Everyone I talk to has the same "meh" attitude. I find the lack of concern from friends and family to be more troubling than a lack of concern from the main stream media.

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logical42将近 12 年前

While I agree with the general reasoning of the author, I hesitate to agree with its conclusion. Like most of us here on hacker news, I've been following the Snowden/Prism/NSA stories rather religiously and, for the most part, have been very happy with the rather overwhelming coverage here on HN.But there have been those getting tired of the news; understandably so, the repetitive hum of media coverage these days is enough to infuriate anyone who has the capacity to remember stuff. The author of this article seems to be pretty infuriated at the the public's fascination with Snowden and wants, rather ambitiously in my opinion, the public to shift their attention to the core of the issue.I'm not sure if the public is capable of maintaining interest in such a passive evil (I guess I probably don't think too highly of the public). I do think, however, that the public is capable of fixating on the Snowden story because it is a rather interesting story. And the longer the public stays fixated on Snowden, the weird guy living in a Russian airport, the longer the NSA's wrongdoings also stay in the public consciousness.I say, keep the melodrama coming, if only to keep alive the story of injustice to the public. The success of Snowden's whistleblowing (i.e. in terms of tangible impact) may actually rest on it.

DanielBMarkham将近 12 年前

"Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe...and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies"Whoa horsey. The author is making the same mistake as he accuses the press of: missing the story.If you want a good repeat-after-me line, repeat after me: "this has nothing to do with the NSA either" All intelligence agencies are either doing this or have plans to do it -- including lots of European ones which are breaking their own laws while doing so. That's yet another shoe that hasn't dropped. Who knows how long it'll take for our European friends to figure it out. Might be a while.But the larger point is valid: the internet as a conduit between a person and the larger world is a cesspool of corporate and government eavesdroppers. We're not operating the net: the net is monitoring our thoughts and recording them for others to inspect at their leisure. This is not a good thing.So the story isn't Snowden, and it's not the NSA either. It's what has become of the dream that was the internet, and the question of whether anybody is left that cares enough about privacy and anonymity to do something about it.

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D9u将近 12 年前

(from the article) US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have itThat part there really illustrates the corporate fascism which has permeated the US government.Who's to say that some analyst working for a private corporation isn't selling our stolen information to some nefarious third-party for whatever reasons?The idea that any "oversight" would preclude the above scenario is about as believable as the insistence by "high level" government appointees claiming that the NSA doesn't "wittingly" collect data from American's communications.

datalus将近 12 年前

What concerns me the most about all of this is that it puts us on a slippery slope. If always on surveillance becomes the norm for people to just take as a fact of life, then it just gets worse from there. I have a couple friends who run a startup and have told me they have given up the fact that privacy is an illusion/out moded when discussing this with them. So if being recorded all the time is the new norm and letting those outside of your own self connect data points about you is okay... where does that lead? That's what I'm really worried about.It spells out my worst fear of later generations of digital natives will actually live in a world best described as Orwellian or even post Orwellian... even more ridiculously pervasive. They wouldn't know any better.Ultimately data can never tell the whole story, but yet we'll act on it as if it does.

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n00b101将近 12 年前

"So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder."This advertisement paid for by your friendly, co-located, on-premise, enterprise hardware vendors.

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amac将近 12 年前

This story is pathetic, it will sell news but it's pretty much nonsense. Clearly, the new era of computing upon us - networked computing - and with it will bring with lots of opportunities as well as many problems to solve.Privacy is one such problem, but it's one we can work together to solve. Humans are capable of this, and capable of more than just writing stuff to cause division like the article.

hamsternipples将近 12 年前

snowden is not the story. it has remained obvious to me that the NSA or whatever organization (rusian, chinese, or whatever) does not need some sort of dinosaur spygame facility to access this data.all they need is just one underpaid programmer without a soul working at facebook to compromise the whole database.wouldn't it be much easier in a case such as this one, for verizon to just have some retard patsy create that backdoor? I would imagine this to be a get out of jail free card for those guys really pulling the strings. all you gatta do is drop all the blame on some naive techie and let him go down in flames.IMO, the next up in this chess game, is a traitor techie willing to compromise a whole nation to pay his bills.

northwest将近 12 年前

> Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is.The fate of the internet's not the story. The fate of democracy is.The fate of democracy's not the story. The fate of our society is.The fate of our society's not the story. The fate of humanity is.

gulfie将近 12 年前

Don't cry for the internet, it's already gone.

snambi将近 12 年前

why everyone is crying about spying issue. The original purpose of internet is military. US government gave access all of access to the internet, because we all wanted to use it. That doesn't mean US govt cannot use it the way it wants to use it.

guard-of-terra将近 12 年前

"If, as a political dissident, you had to choose between organizing your protest on Facebook or Vkontakte, Facebook’s Russian equivalent, you’d be far better off doing it on Facebook."Lol, no, you aren't.What you do is use every platform available.

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lettergram将近 12 年前

The whole idea of surveillance truly doesn't bother me because there is literally nothing I can do if the higher end government did ever decided they wanted me. Since the 50's they've had the ability to listen into conversations via a laser on a window: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone</a> and if anyone really ever believed that the internet would be much different they probably didn't think it all the way through.Sure the internet had that possibility not to be monitored and for a time it probably was, but clearly no longer. Further, I think the idea of mass data collection is monstrous however there is nothing I, nor you can really do about that except perhaps hiding as much of our data as we can (via encryption). Even if our data is encrypted in the end if they want your data they can get your data.The thing I find interesting about this article is the idea that eventually the internet could be closed off only to a few nation states. I disagree this would ever happen because Pandora's box has been opened and some communication will always be allowed via wireless connections, hidden cables, or some other method. Obviously, the average user might be affected, but just like the soviet union fell so would what ever country decided to block off their nation.People don't care about surveillance for the most part, as someone already commented: "I've talked to two people about this issue. Their answers were "Whatever, I don't care" and "honestly, I get it. If they're catching terrorists..."" They do however care if you disconnect their internet, and if any country was to do that in the end it would fail. The point being, the article stated that nation states of internet would develop and my reasoning points to that not happening (at least based off what i've seen). In my honest opinion, the internet has always been a place to communicate, but about as secure with my data as a friend you never quite trust with your secrets. What scares me is not the internet surveillance or my government hunting down (in my opinion) an innocent man. What horrifies me the most is that no matter what we do the surveillance will only become more intense (as the price of computing/computers gets lower) and there is no going back. 50 years from now, what am I going to be faced with and will I be able to continue to just ignore these B.S. laws we have, or if I unlock my cell phone will I really go to jail for 10 years?That's what thoughts keep me up at night, not the idea of my data being collected at mass online (although I would stop it if there was any way I could), but the idea that even offline walking down the street or in my own home I may be required to follow the laws which are outright ridiculous.