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I'm not so sure that will continue to be true. Maybe if Americans convince me that they can elect a Congress and a new president that is very against these mass

by devx 13y ago

I'm not so sure that will continue to be true. Maybe if Americans convince me that they can elect a Congress and a new president that is very against these mass surveillance practices, campaigns on that, and has a proven track record regarding that, maybe I'll change my mind. But as long as US keeps giving itself "freebies" with every foreigner's data, I'm not trusting it. I want some well established rules for how US can access my data, and only with the agreement my government.

krapp 13y ago
That may not be as impossible as it seemed when this all first came to light. Assuming that businesses in other countries put any real financial pressure on American interests by avoiding entanglements with US IT firms or networks, and that there's political traction to be had running against NSA surveillance (at least as long as Obama is President) then there could be pressure to amend, repeal or alter the existing surveillance apparatus on the right as well as the left. That there are, at least, cogent arguments on both sides against it suggests to me that someone's campaign somewhere is considering it.
anologwintermut 13y ago
I think it's important to draw the distinction between freedom in terms of the freedom of speech on the internet and freedom from surveillance on the internet. The US is the largest monitor of the internet because most of the traffic passes through points it can monitor. Changing this would restrict US spying, but it would make it easier for other countries to do it (consider, given the announced Olympic surveillance plans) if all the traffic went through Russia). So you'd have to simply hope traffic doesn't get routed through countries who want to spy on each-other(remember, few if any countries have legal restrictions on foreign surveillance). It seems the only real solution to prevent surveillance is end to end cryptography. The part where it gets dicier is that many of the countries trying to get control of the internet have much poorer legal protections for freedom of speech or social acceptance of it than the US (e.g. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil).
- schoen 13y ago
  This is one reason I think it would be helpful to have a clearer articulation of which functions people are referring to when they talk about "Internet governance", so that other people can understand whether we want those functions to exist at all, and (if so) what kinds of institutions we would like to try to empower to do them. Many things that can be called "Internet governance" have little bearing on Internet users' free speech or privacy -- but others do. This might be akin to the way that RMS suggests that saying "intellectual property" (instead of "copyright", "patent", "trademark", "trade secret", and several sui generis regimes) leads to conceptual muddles. "Internet governance" may have the same problem; maybe it's a term in need of some disaggregation!

by devx 13y ago

krapp 13y ago

That may not be as impossible as it seemed when this all first came to light. Assuming that businesses in other countries put any real financial pressure on American interests by avoiding entanglements with US IT firms or networks, and that there's political traction to be had running against NSA surveillance (at least as long as Obama is President) then there could be pressure to amend, repeal or alter the existing surveillance apparatus on the right as well as the left. That there are, at least, cogent arguments on both sides against it suggests to me that someone's campaign somewhere is considering it.

anologwintermut 13y ago

I think it's important to draw the distinction between freedom in terms of the freedom of speech on the internet and freedom from surveillance on the internet. The US is the largest monitor of the internet because most of the traffic passes through points it can monitor. Changing this would restrict US spying, but it would make it easier for other countries to do it (consider, given the announced Olympic surveillance plans) if all the traffic went through Russia). So you'd have to simply hope traffic doesn't get routed through countries who want to spy on each-other(remember, few if any countries have legal restrictions on foreign surveillance). It seems the only real solution to prevent surveillance is end to end cryptography. The part where it gets dicier is that many of the countries trying to get control of the internet have much poorer legal protections for freedom of speech or social acceptance of it than the US (e.g. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil).

schoen 13y ago
This is one reason I think it would be helpful to have a clearer articulation of which functions people are referring to when they talk about "Internet governance", so that other people can understand whether we want those functions to exist at all, and (if so) what kinds of institutions we would like to try to empower to do them. Many things that can be called "Internet governance" have little bearing on Internet users' free speech or privacy -- but others do. This might be akin to the way that RMS suggests that saying "intellectual property" (instead of "copyright", "patent", "trademark", "trade secret", and several sui generis regimes) leads to conceptual muddles. "Internet governance" may have the same problem; maybe it's a term in need of some disaggregation!