by Paul Rosenberg, Cryptohippie
This past year has been a wild one for the Internet and electronic privacy in general. Governments and marketers have gone far beyond what we would have guessed in 2012: their surveillance state is taking shape faster than expected.
THE GOOD NEWS
I normally like to get the bad news out of the way first, but this time I’ll go through a brief piece of good news and an ugly story about the UN (what isn’t ugly about the UN?) and their supposed takeover of the Internet. Then I’ll close with the nasty news.
The good news is that we have a new feature at Cryptohippie, and more on the way.
Because the exits from our network are in Europe, some popular entertainment sites wouldn’t allow our users to enter. Hulu and Netflix are the ones many of our customers asked about, and we also received questions about some YouTube videos being blocked. There was really nothing to be done about it at the time, and if missing a few bits of entertainment were the price of security, it would be a small price to pay.
But it’s our job to give our customers what they want – at least as much as we can – so we created a special secondary exit that isn’t blocked. So, with about ten minutes of changing settings, you can now get the missing sites. Security for this secondary exit is slightly modified (an extra hop, but somewhat less anti-correlation), and the speed is slower, but you can now watch America TV from anywhere.
THE UGLY NEWS
I’m sure you’ve heard lots of stories about the UN trying to “take over the Internet” at some upcoming meetings in Dubai. A lot of these stories are written to scare people, and are being placed in the “news” by journalists allied with the various belligerents. (Friends don’t let friends watch network news.)
The fight that matters is over control of ICANN, the group that doles out IP addresses, among other things. Up till now, the Internet has generally been managed by multiple “stakeholders” (the big telecoms, some governments), but because of US piggishness, everyone outside the US/EU/Israel alliance has thoughts of taking it over.
Our best guess is that ICANN will remain mostly intact; the US will probably back-off a bit and promise to play nice. But this is the crucial issue; ICANN must not be owned by the States.
The next big fight is over what is being falsely called a tax. The problem here is that the big companies have been pushing the little companies around. For example, more or less every server on the planet is over-priced because incoming and outgoing traffic are charged the same, allowing Google to index everyone’s web site at the site’s expense. Because of this, the smalls want mandatory contracts that would charge separately for initiating traffic. Google and their ‘friends’ are trying hard to squash this one. We’re guessing that they’ll succeed.
I pass on the cyber-security, “caller ID” and disconnect contract issues: they really don’t matter much anyway.
One thing to remember is that none of this is about privacy, censorship or free speech. This is about politics, economic issues and the usual jockeying for dominance. All of these parties are already spying and censoring.
OK, THE BAD NEWS
Let me start with a few links:
The NSA is spying on every American, and very deeply spying on us. Read it here.
A surveillance system has been installed inside of Facebook. See this and this.
AT&T has been giving all of its Internet traffic to the NSA since at least 2006. Read it here.
Union thugs have no problem intercepting emails. See here.
Newspapers are having no problems intercepting emails. See here.
Stores are now installing face recognition systems. See here.
The FedGuv is paying big bucks for systems to “predict crime”. Read it here.
The FBI is building a nation-wide facial recognition system. Read it here.
Biometric identification is being rolled out in grammar schools. See it here.
I’m hesitant to continue, because it may overwhelm you, which is not helpful. But we’ve lost the luxury of time and you should know.
The really scary thing is that the snoops of the world are not content to take all your information: they’re also using it to generate individual-specific feedback. You’ve seen this for several years already: after you do a Google search on skis you start to get ads for discount travel to Vail. That was just the initial phase.
The really bad news is that psychologists and marketing experts are taking this information (a very detailed virtual ‘you’) and are building systems to invisibly guide you toward decisions that are “better for you.” I know that this sounds like a distopian novel, but it’s very real.
The instigator and architect of this dark story is the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – one of Obama’s ‘Czars’.
Here are a few things this guy has been writing in books and scholarly papers:
It is legitimate for choice architects to influence people’s behavior. (These “choice architects” are his academic/government friends.)
Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories.
Government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes.
And yes, this is precisely what is taking shape now. It has government, corporate and academic support, and lots of experts are getting very nice paychecks for building it (while avoiding any thoughts of responsibility).
Advertisers are finding their holy grail in this: being able to catch you just at the moment when you’re in the mood, then delivering a custom ad that shows you precisely how to scratch the itch they implanted.
The bottom line is this: A very deep surveillance state is being completed now. It’s your choice whether or not you’ll escape it. If you can’t afford our privacy system, get Tor, GPG, Pigeon and OTR and learn how to use them. If you don’t want to do that, pay Cryptohippie to do it for you. But do something.
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