[kictanet] Death of the Internet?

[Brian Munyao Longwe]

Dear all,

A phrase in this article boldly states "the issue of internet governance is
about to become very difficult.Given what we now know about how the US and
its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global
infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue
to control it has become untenable."

Food for thought.....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/28/edward-snowden-death-of-internet
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Repeat after me: Edward
Snowden<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/edward-snowden> is
not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of
our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's
mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised
Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for
journalists<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoop_%28novel%29> was
one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are:
incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or
gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy
rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is
that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has
achieved<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/global/the-service-of-snowden.html?_r=0>
thus
far.

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency
(NSA<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/nsa>)
had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of
citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone
records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has
been able to bend nine US
internet<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet> companies
to its demands for access to their users' data.

Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US
government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised
business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such asBooz
Allen Hamilton<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/edward-snowden-investigate-booz-allen>
and,
in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who
shouldn't have it. Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between
Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas
franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance
between freedom and security lies.

These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order
consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are
concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been
fed a constant stream of journalistic pap – speculation about Snowden's
travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The
"human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA
revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the
direction in which it is heading.

As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as
a result of what we have learned so far.

The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are
numbered. 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.

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become *very*contentious.
Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing
their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the
western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become
untenable.

Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed
out<http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueberwachung/information-consumerism-the-price-of-hypocrisy-12292374.html>,
the Obama administration's "internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as
patronising cant. "Today," he writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet
freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda'
after Abu Ghraib."

That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have
implications for you and me.

They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted
to protect our privacy <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/privacy> or data.
The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are
all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. 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. That means that if you're thinking of
outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft,
then think again.

And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a
newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the
European Commission, had to say on the matter
recently<http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-13-654_en.htm>.
"If businesses or governments think they might be spied on," she said,
"they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud
providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold
your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being
shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any
smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act
rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."

Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon
or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents,
tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder
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