Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

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I'm finding the degree to which the political establishment is clueless as to the actual hard technical details of what is happening with this entire episode quite interesting, for example a quote from a recent article on the arab press response to the incident;

No one knows the truth of this WikiLeaks thing. Is it plausible that the United States with all its greatness, power and valor, cannot stop WikiLeaks and its millions of documents? Or have these documents been leaked by the Americans themselves to achieve a particular goal? Or has America simply turned a blind eye to the leak?

China's paranoia and amusing conclusions about the "fundamentally controllable" nature of the web also betray a lack of understanding of how this all really works, and a lot of the US response seems to fail to grasp that the game is already over and wikileaks has already won regardless of any action they take from here on in short of turning off the internet. And even the effectiveness of that is questionable, disregarding the fact that it simply will not happen.

The web can be controlled. It's just much harder and expensive to do so.

But what China should be worrying about is whether it can keep controlling the people in general. As the government begins to meet basic human needs, the citizens will start to yearn for higher needs to be satisfied like freedom of information. The government cannot provide that and continue it's authoritarian regime.

>As the government begins to meet basic human needs, the citizens will start to yearn for higher needs to be satisfied like freedom of information.

Really? I mean, its nice to paraphrase Maslow and all, but what evidence do you have that it will actually turn out that way? At least, here in the US, the citizenry seems to be tolerating a government that becomes more authoritarian with regards to freedom of information and rights against unreasonable searches.

I do hope that things do turn out the way you envision. My fear is that you're seeing inevitability where I see historical caprice.

The web can only be controlled so long as it's a wired affair.

If the concept of a wireless mesh can be realized, it's game over for anything but a silly illusion of control.

And if one controls the technology which creates the mesh? ie, requires a back-door into every device?

Excellent point. Vintage networking hardware could start to become quite valuable.

Assuming it's still compatible with anything else at that point. Honestly, though? With cheap mass storage, we could end up going all the way down to sneakernet.

They really could do a lot more to control the internet. Not fully, of course. It can't ever be fully controlled. But they really could do a lot to put us into an age of digital prohibition.

That cost becomes a big deal when you're competing with people who decide not to tax their creative populations in the same way. Unfortunately for Americans, there's a huge gap between what we consider unacceptable, and what China disallows. That means the US tax can go up considerably before becoming uncompetitive.

At the same time getting into the "how stupid can you be and still come out ahead?" race opens up tremendous opportunity for others who are far more nimble, and are only too happy to place bets on which economic superpower will choke itself first.

Couldn't the web be controlled from a legal standpoint? What if people had to fear imprisonment for downloading classified documents? I'm not asking this rhetorically; I'm hoping someone can point out why I'm incorrect.

I don't think it's possible to control the internet when any sort of stronger encryption is available that prevents inspection of passing information by the routing nodes. Even then, you could use steganography to hide data. It would be very, very difficult to enforce this sort of legal restriction even if it were passed as a law.

As the web stands currently, no. Look at repressive regimes such as China where dissidents still get unfiltered net access via VPN, or at the other end of the spectrum technical measures such as freenet that make the current situation look like a locked down paradise for authorities.

The fundamental architecture could be changed to the point where it actually was controllable, for example if all packets had to be encrypted with a key that was provided to the sender by a centralised authority. This would make all the unencrypted traffic stand out like a sore thumb, and the encrypted traffic would be amenable to deep packet inspection and the like by the centralised authority. Banning encryption that does not use an escrow key would of course also be necessary, but this would also stand out like a sore thumb.

To say the technical challenges of actually implementing the aforementioned approach are non trivial however is to put it mildly, not to mention the necessary political hurdles and the degree of power the centralised authority in question would need to have to practically pull such a plan off. We're not there by a long shot, and it appears that the majority of people who want us to get there do not have the intellectual capital to pull it off or indeed even come up with it, or indeed even understand the reason that they would need to come up with it.

And if you're watching, you can't steal mine, I've patented it. ;)

It's true China cannot absolutely filter the web. However the majority of the people won't bother with VPN. China doesn't need to make dissident ideas absolutely contained to be effective. They just need to make it sufficiently hard for those ideas to spread.

It depends on how strongly the ideas resonate with the populace.

The dangerous thing about containing dissident ideas is that when a society begins to function less well, the average person has greater incentive to learn about alternative ideas. So alternative ideas become readily available exactly when they seem most plausible. That's what has historically made authoritarian regimes fragile.

It's not about the idea. It's the execution. China has the power to effectively mold the minds of the majority (like 80-90%), and the majority is all that's needed. The idea may be in the back of the minds of a lot of people but China can prevent them from coordinating, spreading, and developing those ideas.

If China had a popular democracy, they'd only need to mold the minds of 51% of the populace (assuming Australian-style compulsory voting, or 31% assuming US-et-al-style voluntary voting).

As you point out yourself, that's hard, and only getting even harder.

Everything gets harder as things change and you need to adapt. But I don't think China is having too much trouble adapting. Their tactics are working at shaping the population's minds. They may not be able to bend minds but they certainly can mold and guide it.

I hope you are right but even knowing a fair amount about web technologies I am not certain that the Internet is technologically uncontrollable.

Deep packet inspection and the seizing of domain names are tools that authorities could use if they generally agreed on their goals. If Wikileaks' activities were considered out-and-out illegal and indefensible a-la child pornography, I'm doubtful we would see a lot of them.

So it seems to me that Wikileaks' activities are being protected by Western free speech traditions as much as by technological barriers.

And yet as bad as it is, CP isn't hard to find--it's just if you're found with it you're in huge trouble. The people found with CP aren't typically expert computer users...

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