Re:NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry
by jka on Saturday September 07, 2013 @01:26PM
(#6345728)
At some level I'm very disappointed and depressed by the revelations, even though I'm not surprised and had suspected much of it, since it 'seemed' possible, and these agencies are in a continuous arms race largely of their own paranoid invention (although I would argue that the CIA does more than it's fair share to ensure that foreign meddling is a reality that the world has to deal with). This is why I think the story about adversary roadmaps being affected is largely nonsense; many, many hackers have known about these possibilities for a long time.
I feel like a lot of businesses and VC funds have intentionally tried to push towards collecting as much user data and communications as possible, knowing how valuable it will be not only for advertising and genuine business, but also for national and international security, a world of secret dollars and prop-ups for important data stations.
Maybe that's me pushing too much complicity where none exists, but I honestly get the feeling that there must have been enough people with experience of communications interception history in S.V. (IT, telecoms, communications have existed for a long time before Internet startups, and will have been doing similar things during the cold war) to know that this was going to be a big trend. They would have been able to least slightly influence the recent trends towards 'openness' and 'social sharing', which neatly leverage narcissism, human psychology, and network effects to draw people in (and promote consumerism as a side benefit).
The inward-looking nature of the U.S. is definitely a concern as well - there's still certainly a huge amount of naivety about the rest of the world and the way things work elsewhere, even in cultured circles where people travel -- ultimately the news and media still set a lot of opinions. There is an awareness that many things operate differently in other countries, but very often only a miniscule understanding of different cultures (socialized healthcare being a long-running example).
So yes, it is very annoying that so much data travels over U.S. links, and that there is so much focus on how everything is OK, because the U.S. works hard to avoid spying on it's own citizens -- when that is just a tiny proportion of the world population, which is broadly innocent. At near enough a billion users, a huge proportion of Facebook users have no protection from this at all - and so any upcoming politicians in other countries are completely open to access, presumably.
I would disagree slightly on the point regarding other countries - I honestly think that on the whole, the U.S. does still respect free speech and has a bit of an edge on other countries in terms of liberties, but the trends are very worrying, and what will be important is how it reacts as a country to legitimate attempts to understand, curtail, and avoid all this surveillance.
All this said, I'm an eternal optimist - I think we have the tools to build very good secure communications, and I think we can do it with distributed systems. We can now transfer value without banks using bitcoin, route traffic very ambiguously and easily using Tor, encrypt and send messages anonymously using bitmessage/PGP/etc. It is possible to get off Gmail and Facebook, we just need to make it easier to do so, and provide the functionality that everyone expects in a more distributed setting.
There's a lot of work to make it all easy to use safely (even for hackers, but then for everyone), and then a lot more work to get it adopted widely, but I think there will be a huge appetite for it now, and I think it can be done. The more revelations that appear and the more that the realities of centralization and surveillance become part of the public understanding, the easier it'll be to persuade people to use secure services -- and crucially, the better people will be able to critique the vulnerabilities of them.
Money and marketing are a huge force multiplier for centralized services (especially if they have state-level support), but ultimately as long as the Internet is there and allows us to communicate, eventually we'll figure this stuff out and build the tools we need.
I feel like a lot of businesses and VC funds have intentionally tried to push towards collecting as much user data and communications as possible, knowing how valuable it will be not only for advertising and genuine business, but also for national and international security, a world of secret dollars and prop-ups for important data stations.
Maybe that's me pushing too much complicity where none exists, but I honestly get the feeling that there must have been enough people with experience of communications interception history in S.V. (IT, telecoms, communications have existed for a long time before Internet startups, and will have been doing similar things during the cold war) to know that this was going to be a big trend. They would have been able to least slightly influence the recent trends towards 'openness' and 'social sharing', which neatly leverage narcissism, human psychology, and network effects to draw people in (and promote consumerism as a side benefit).
The inward-looking nature of the U.S. is definitely a concern as well - there's still certainly a huge amount of naivety about the rest of the world and the way things work elsewhere, even in cultured circles where people travel -- ultimately the news and media still set a lot of opinions. There is an awareness that many things operate differently in other countries, but very often only a miniscule understanding of different cultures (socialized healthcare being a long-running example).
So yes, it is very annoying that so much data travels over U.S. links, and that there is so much focus on how everything is OK, because the U.S. works hard to avoid spying on it's own citizens -- when that is just a tiny proportion of the world population, which is broadly innocent. At near enough a billion users, a huge proportion of Facebook users have no protection from this at all - and so any upcoming politicians in other countries are completely open to access, presumably.
I would disagree slightly on the point regarding other countries - I honestly think that on the whole, the U.S. does still respect free speech and has a bit of an edge on other countries in terms of liberties, but the trends are very worrying, and what will be important is how it reacts as a country to legitimate attempts to understand, curtail, and avoid all this surveillance.
All this said, I'm an eternal optimist - I think we have the tools to build very good secure communications, and I think we can do it with distributed systems. We can now transfer value without banks using bitcoin, route traffic very ambiguously and easily using Tor, encrypt and send messages anonymously using bitmessage/PGP/etc. It is possible to get off Gmail and Facebook, we just need to make it easier to do so, and provide the functionality that everyone expects in a more distributed setting.
There's a lot of work to make it all easy to use safely (even for hackers, but then for everyone), and then a lot more work to get it adopted widely, but I think there will be a huge appetite for it now, and I think it can be done. The more revelations that appear and the more that the realities of centralization and surveillance become part of the public understanding, the easier it'll be to persuade people to use secure services -- and crucially, the better people will be able to critique the vulnerabilities of them.
Money and marketing are a huge force multiplier for centralized services (especially if they have state-level support), but ultimately as long as the Internet is there and allows us to communicate, eventually we'll figure this stuff out and build the tools we need.