Most comments I've seen about this issue seem very American, going along the lines of "stop the hypocrisy, everybody does it". It is useless to argue against such view, cynicism is usually unpermeable to arguments.
However, regardless if "everybody does it" or not this story will have implications. It is a very strong argument for a new kind of walled garden: the nationally restricted Internet. We should expect a strong growth of the China-style Internet.
This surveillance is now seen in Latin America as a threat from the classic "American Imperialism". In the name of "protection" from real or imaginary dangers politicians, bureaucrats and autocrats will enforce Internet monitoring within a lot of countries. Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, expect a lot of trouble.
It makes no sense to use quotation marks around the term American Imperialism, as if it wasn't real. That the US is an empire is beyond question, and Snowden has shown that it has turned the internet into an unprecedented tool for global control.
No statesman in their right mind would allow a foreign power to freely operate such a tool undisturbed in their territory/population. Internet sovereignty should be a priority of any government interested in preserving at least some degree of national autonomy, and indeed neglecting to so after what has been made public would be either a sign of great weakness or of being a US-puppet government... or both. The later is the case of my government. The countries that have complained louder are indeed the countries with some degree of power.
Speaking of the Chinese, I think that Snowden has only proved that there is actually a lot to learn from them. They have been the smartest ones since the begining, when early on they realised the nature of Google, Facebook and the like, and refused to let their population become addicted to giving all their information for US corporations to mine, store, analyze, profit, and provide intelligence to the US government.
Of course the above doesn't mean that the Internet should become surveilled by all local governments. The point is that the changes that should be made are toward a globally decentralised web should also not lead to locally operated surveillance, but the first does not imply the second. Surveillance is a political decision.
Chinese Internet is both more autonomous and more controlled. The first attribute is desireable while the second is not. I think it is key to keep in mind the distinction between those two things to make the best out of what is coming next.
> This surveillance is now seen in Latin America as a threat from the classic "American Imperialism"
Funny you mention that, cause Latin America has always been treated as a colony by the US. Recent detention of the Bolivian presidential plane is a good example of this arrogant attitude.
There's less prominent, but a similar condescending tone towards Europe, which for decades has been a puppet in the US geopolitical games. It could be tolerated while the threat of the evil commies existed. That threat is long gone, but militant ambitions of the US remained.
After the decade of wars, kidnappings, tortures, drones, and general world policing by the US, Europeans and other nations have had enough of it. I see a wave of anti-American, pro-nationalist sentiment on the rise. It is unfortunate, but rightly deserved.
The irony of it is that it is the military and security complex that will cash in on this development. More threats means more money and more power, which is less freedom for us, the people.
This is a good point, one of the outcomes of this mess might be more control over internets than less control. At some point we'll need to dust off our uucp code to get back to a more independent network.
That said, when I was at USC and the 'net' was ARPANet and the Fido was just the name of a dog, it was very much a 'controlled' net with no spam (your host got detached) or commercial speech (same punishment). Which made for a pretty sterile (if geeky experience). When Berkeley and PARC started to create gateways between those 'unwashed' nodes and the ARPAnet it was quite different. I could easily see a call to go more 'milnet' on the public infrastructure with the monitoring overt and 'known' like it was on ARPAnet in the same of security. That would be a bad outcome in my opinion.
If I were a surveillance apparatus listening in on foreign internets, tighter local control is exactly what I'd want. I'd only have to hack into the national firewall to listen in on data rather than thousands or millions of individual networks.
I too fear the China-style internet as a response. However there are alternative responses which may be beneficial if we take a constructive approach. I see no better time than now for many countries to get behind the ideas of Eben Moglen and actively fund open source work in the basic hardware and software than all countries need. Some 21 countries are getting together to challenge the US at the UN. I would love it if these same 21 countries put money where their mouth is and actively funded the thousands of excellent independent open source developers who would love to actively create fully free and open-source basic software and hardware full time. These individuals are not hard to identify and support. Give them the money to quit their day jobs and build FOSS full time.
If that's the worst case scenario we're doing pretty OK. The nationalist networks will presumably be like the PSTN in the 90s: ubiquitous, reliable, safe but perceived as safer than it is, overpriced, limited, behind. All the interesting stuff will happen over tunnels to the Internet Internet.
Well, it depends how they do it, right? If they just block DNS, yeah, people who care can simply tunnel out. It still hurts, as the average non-caring citizen's knowledge is stunted. But not as badly.
If they block IPs, and closely monitor outgoing tunnels? Then it's a lot harder to get out.
I suspect you're right, they'll probably just block DNS and the worst IPs. It's easier, and DNS gets the 99%. Even The Great Firewall only blocks the 'worst' IPs (like Twitter).
I actually like this future more and more as it implies the opportunity to rebuild a new internet on top of the old internet with all the lessons learned from the first internet. It's not that the first will cease to exist. There are too many vested commercial interests for that to happen. The second internet will have the opportunity to develop separate from these commercial and government interests and will hopefully be better designed to protect against the shortcomings that left the first internet vulnerable to government meddling. Even if it takes us 10-20 years to get there, it will be worth it.
Right. It also does DNS poisoning, URL word analysing, deep packet inspection, and VPN identification & blocking. I meant it only directly blocks the worst IPs, as opposed to directly blocking all external IPs.
I do wonder whether a US Firewall will be worse or better than China's. On one hand, the US is presumably less autocratic. On the other, we have 10x the defense resources.
My little theory is that this can help Europe to become a player in the Internet. The point is that individual European countries cannot create their own internet - they are too small and too much interconnected (especially if they are in the European Union) - but on the other hand they are separate countries. The effect I would like to see is that they develop ways how to be trustworthy and also how to check if your partner is reliable. First between themselves - then their solutions will be attractive to the whole world. Which router would you trust - one from China, one from the USA or one from Germany - when you know that Germany also exports the routers to France and UK and they check them?
I think the outrage isn't that we (Americans) did it. The pros know we spy on everything we can, all the time. But the outrage is that now there are newspapers all over the world telling John Q. Public (Johan Q. Public?) what happened. That puts pressure on Merkel from her own citizens. So the Americans will take their public lumps, apologize, and everyone will get back to business.
Most comments I've seen about this issue seem very American, going along the lines of "stop the hypocrisy, everybody does it". It is useless to argue against such view, cynicism is usually unpermeable to arguments.
However, regardless if "everybody does it" or not this story will have implications. It is a very strong argument for a new kind of walled garden: the nationally restricted Internet. We should expect a strong growth of the China-style Internet.
This surveillance is now seen in Latin America as a threat from the classic "American Imperialism". In the name of "protection" from real or imaginary dangers politicians, bureaucrats and autocrats will enforce Internet monitoring within a lot of countries. Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, expect a lot of trouble.