I guess hoping for a dramatic dismantling of Bluffdale and Clapper's arrest on perjury charges was always unrealistic.
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.
Insofar as the Internet is an "entity" with any of the kind of agency that would allow it to "abandon" anything, it is governed by telcos, 5-6 major US Internet companies, and the content industry.
Brazil's government (and UNASUR as well) is pushing for building connectivity for all of South America, excluding the USA, so all information flows between countries without going through US companies.
This makes sense for any number of simple logistical reasons, none of which have anything to do with the principled stands of ICANN, IANA, or the IETF.
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.
It baffles me that nobody here seems to realize what this is about, and what it's NOT about. It's not about Prism, it's not about US spying, it's not about that at all. The governments tried to bend the internet to their will last year through the UN, throught the ITU, and failed. Mostly due to US opposition.
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.
As a Canadian, I wish this were possible for us. Virtually all of our Internet traffic, even to hosts in other parts of Canada, go through American territory. I'm not sure if it would even be possible to route our traffic around the US.
"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. "
By the way, the lastest controversial Snowden leak is that Canada was spying on Brazil's Ministry of Mines and Energy (then officially stated that this was not economic spying...)
A few chinese internet/content companies have hundreds millions users. (more than double the population of US.)
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.
The platform of the internet is not wires. It's not AT&T and it's not switches, it's not deep packet inspection routing "low priority" packets around "congestion" and it's not HTML5 or JavaScript. It's not a cloud, and it's not a PaaS.
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.
To the extent that the US provided technical leadership, resources, stability and benevolent dictatorship, they could hope for the community following them as the best alternative. There is no longer any basis for such hope or expectation.
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.
This. We nurtured it, we funded it, and as recently as WCIT-12, I personally had zero desire for international governance, as many other countries have some very 'non-open' ideas about what to do with the Internet. But, as it turns out, so do we.
Exactly the point though, towards the end of the article, they lament the fact that instead of an open and somewhat self-regulating environment, we are getting more "political oversight".
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.
I guess everyone is getting tired of the Arrogance and heavy-handedness of the NSA.
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)
While this is necessary knowing what we now know. I really hope it isn't continued by the UN as a tool for the countries with worse human rights violations.
the day snowden announced that a bazilian company (vale) was spied she cancelled a trip to washington if no official explanation was given before her visit.
on her latest UN adress, which btw was right before obama's, she ended with strong criticism and call to action about the program.
That's showing off as a critical. Nothing was DONE. A lot was said.
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.
Hopefully, this will just involve transferring the governing authority away from the U.S. government without changing how the IETF/IANA are actually operated.
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.
The more that people buy into the idea that the only problem is the US the easier it is for the entire West to continue with business as usual, regardless of election time posturing by EU nations.
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.
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.