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Bruce Schneier's Proposal to dedicate November meeting to saving the Internet from the NSA

2013-09-05 19:18:21

This is bigger than the "perpass" list.

I suggested that the surveillance/broken crypto challenge represents "damage to 
the Internet". I'm not the only one thinking that way.

I'd like to share the challenge raised by Bruce Schneier in:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-internet-nsa-spying


To quote:

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We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting 
routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud 
systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I've just 
started collecting. I want 50. There's safety in numbers, and this form of 
civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.

Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to 
prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent 
communications intermediaries from leaking private information.

We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open 
protocols, open implementations, open systems – these will be harder for the 
NSA to subvert.

The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that 
make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. 
This group needs dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, 
and demands an emergency response.
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The gauntlet is in our face. What are we going to do about it?


--
Dean Willis