Catching Up With The Times

Late last week, I wrote an article about the NSA in which I noted that we are dealing with a Congress that doesn’t understand technology, and laws that were made for a different time and different technology (at least when understanding what search and seizure mean). Today there was an article in Slashdot that made an even more important point:

John Naughton writes in the Guardian that the insight that seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media regarding the revelations from Edward Snowden is how the US has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users’ data proving that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. ‘The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system,’ writes Naughton. ‘Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their “cloud” services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA.’ This spells the end of the internet as a truly global network. ‘It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.’

The point made here is the statement that the Internet is a truly global network. What’s the problem? Let me tell you.

America’s laws… and America’s security structures and organizations… are based essentially in the period immediately after WWII. 1947 is when the NSA was created. Back then, communication was primarily domestic — there were clear international paths for the NSA to monitor to protect the country. Fast forward to today. We’re dealing with multinational communications companies located who knows where, governed by who knows what laws, handling data from all across the globe. Any Internet traffic stream may contain not only packets traversing from a domestic computer to a domestic computer, but international to international and international to domestic. Further, transportation has made the world smaller, and there are more and more foreign (i.e., non-US) visitors and workers in the US (both legally and illegally). Now imagine you are an agency (such as the NSA) charged with monitoring International traffic — what do you do? Yup. Supposed you are the FBI monitoring international traffic to fight against illegally trafficed material? There is no longer an easy way to just get the data you want from the information stream. You end up collecting it all, and attempting to find that needle in the haystack later.

Understanding this is key to solving the problem. We can see how we got into the legal boat we are in — it is easy to see the arguments that were made to Congress, and how they misunderstood what they were authorizing. Instead of complaining that we are in a “big brother” state and the government is out to get us (which is a lot of what I see), what we need to do is simple.

1. Educate our representatives and leaders about the technology so they understand that which about they are writing laws.

2. Vote for people who understand and agree to work to move the pendulum back to protecting privacy in the new global society. The pendulum swings between being overly secure and not. We just have to keep working to get it right.

3. Stop electing the lawyers and partisans. Let’s get some people who actually understand technology and know how to think critically elected.

The problems we are dealing with here took many years to get to this point. We’re not going to fix them overnight. Slow and steady education… and, as I’ve said before, understanding that we are not dealing with evil, we’re dealing with stupidity and bureaurcracy. If you want evil, look at those multinational corporations.

This entry was originally posted on Observations Along The Road (on cahighways.org) as this entry by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link below; you can sign in with your LJ, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. There are currently comments on the Wordpress blog. PS: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.

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