The core Internet institutions abandon the US Government
internetgovernance.org
internetgovernance.org
In reality, we've already started to win. Jewel v. NSA, rather than being dismissed under executive privilege and placed into the realm of "paranoid nutjobs" is proceeding strongly, as are a multitude of other lawsuits with strong merit.
There's been a renewed interest in stronger systems, which will ultimately be the only way to prevent against surveillance. After all, policy changes only are secure and trustworthy of the government that makes them.
The transfer of Internet institutional power away from the US is just another step, even if it's probably a bit less useful than you might suppose, given that every major technological power has also participated in similar surveillance schemes.
So while I still wish for political reform in the short-term, I am continually re-assured by other efforts which will solve this issue in the long-run. So long as we don't forget about this issue, it will be solved one way or another.
But even if we weren't, it would be possible for American agencies to intercept Canadian traffic without any sort of due procedure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Community
"The United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement is a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The alliance of intelligence operations is also known as Five Eyes (FVEY). It was first signed in March 1946 by the United Kingdom and the United States and later extended to encompass the three Commonwealth realms of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. "
My point is simply that people shouldn't be looking to the standards bodies for help. They were at best asleep at the switch for the last 20 years, and at worst complicit. The most charitable thing you can say about "Internet governance's" role in dragnet surveillance is that they prioritized internal politics over end-user safety, again and again and again.
I don't blame the people involved with these groups; most of them are involved with the best of intentions. The failures of Internet governance are the expected emergent behaviors of any standards body.
Here's what it's about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication...
A few choice proposals the UN demanded be implemented (mostly, but not exclusively, pushed by China and islamic nations):
1) Banning of anonymity on the internet (Chinese style no commenting without a government-verified name below the comment)
2) Pervasive options for all government to remove any piece of content from the internet, irrespective of where it's hosted.
3) The ability of any worldwide governments to retract naming assignments from any entity for any reason.
4) The ability for governments to demand transit IPSs themselves implement "great firewalls" around any territory (including the very inconvenient (for service providers) url blocking, since of course police or governments can't be bothered to think)
Here's what these governments wanted to see: you offend China, as a Finnish citizen ? no more IPs for you, not from RIPE, ARIN, or anywhere. Posted a videoclip illustrating that the islamic prophet is a mass-murdering slaver ? No more dns names for you.
They intend to use this to exert media control on the new media. Western EU is upset that neo-nazi organisations have internet sites that they effectively can't touch, and can't find the owners of. Eastern EU are almost-dictatorships, and well ... don't ask. China, well, can't just download the mail of the Dalai Lama anymore. And islamic governments are terrified of their own citizens and want the ability to take Danish cartoons offline, and porn, and ... before history repeats itself. None of this is good for freedom, of course.
For half of the governments involved that this is bad for freedom is the very reason they're doing it.
Anybody who thinks this move is anything other than non-US governments threatening these guys into giving them what they demanded before is delusional.
Anybody thinking more freedom will be the result is a dangerous lunatic.
The internet is TCP/IP, and on the internet packets are routed by their headers, not by their content.
Some parts of the internet are actually a corporate LAN in america, with it's own rules for routing. So, a lot of routers will route around America since it seems to drop a lot of packets or return corrupted packets. Perhaps what IP really needs is a way for applications to report network degradation so that OSPF can correctly quantify each part of the network, instead smart routers that try to prioritize traffic by capitalist metrics. It's quite clear OSPF is broken when a route is selected that would allow for injecting of protocol/application hijacking packets for network issues to disguise what would otherwise be a congested path.
Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ : As of 20 March 2013, there are 798.2 million active QQ accounts, with a peak of 176.4 million simultaneous online QQ users.
"...turned their back on the US government..."
"...he conspired with her to convene a global meeting..."
The "major Internet organizations" have about as much organization as a room full of cats. Don't expect this important action to actually mean much.
Except possibly for a new herd of top-level domains, useful primarily to extort money from trademark owners.
I don't think we fumbled our right to lead. Internet standards are bigger than the US. This is good, imho.
Arrogance - We (NSA) will sabotage, undermine and subvert legitimate efforts at security because we need the ability to Snoop on everybody. Thus making the Internet Unsafe for everybody else as well only to suit their paranoid needs.
Heavy-Handed: We will store all communications that we get get our hands on either directly or thru foreign lap-dog governments(Five eyes). The rights of Americans other nationals and everybody else be dammed.
About time some one held their feet to the fire for this nonsense. Snowden should be given the Nobel Prize for Human rights (A new category that needs to be set up)
It's probably been a long time coming, and too bad it had to happen the way it did, but that seems to be the way these days in so many areas of US "leadership." We can't be trusted.
Political oversight is seldom effective, especially when you try to honor the rhetoric that everyone must be on equal footing. With such a plurality of stakeholders, any consensus is extremely difficult to achieve. Instead, you often end-up with a bunch of half-measures and nuisance regulations.
In my own ideal world, governments and their regulations stay within their borders and the "Internet" as a pseudo-entity is not regulated in any way.
Regardless, let's hope this segregation happens and the internet can get a little bit of freedom from the greedy hands of the US Government.
on her latest UN adress, which btw was right before obama's, she ended with strong criticism and call to action about the program.
And even raged on twitter (yes, raged on twitter, teenager style).
How that is not being intensely critical?
If she had actually taken action against it, I'd buy it. She didn't and she won't, so I (and you should too) assume that's just propaganda. At least in Brazil it's how every politician plays the game.
my guess is that latin countries will have a local exchange instead, which is about damn time to be honest.
which happens regardless of that meeting...
It would be bad if the traditional, international standards-setting organizations (e.g. ITU, ISO, ECMA, IEEE, etc.) ended up gaining control over the IETF/IANA, and they've been eying for it for some time now.
death to all lazy slobs who just cancel zoom on mobile instead of doing his/her work.
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NSA efforts have focused on exploiting applications, weakening encryption standards, and subverting telcos and big hosted service providers. None of those are managed by Internet governance bodies. Altering the internal structure of ICANN would not inhibit NSA activities one bit.
The revelations of NSA spying have pissed off a lot of other countries, and no doubt increased their desire to splinter the Internet into a federation of national networks, which would be easier for them to each respectively control. That would help them protect from NSA spying... but it would also give them greater capability to control every other aspect of Internet access.
This is the approach that was rejected at the ITU, and recall that we all cheered that result.
I think it's interesting that this article describes the values of freedom and democracy as cherished by the U.S. Aren't they cherished by all people? Who doesn't want to be free?
There is a group of people who don't cherish those values, and those are the leaders of national governments that are known to be oppressive, censorious, or both. Would China really be a better steward of "Internet values" than the U.S.? I don't think so.