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May 24, 2013
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 Web Inventor: Stop the British Snooping BillPosted on Apr 18, 2012
The British government’s plan to turn the Internet into a national intelligence cache that stores data on every U.K. Web surfer was frustrated Tuesday when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, condemned such a move as a “destruction of human rights.” But his criticism was not frustrating enough, with the British home secretary promising to continue with the program in the coming weeks. The new rules would allow U.K. Government Communication Headquarters to “monitor all communication on social media, Skype calls and email communication as well as logging every site visited by Internet users in Britain.” [Correction: In an earlier version of this Truthdig article Berners-Lee was called the inventor of the Internet. Instead, he is considered to be the inventor of the World Wide Web.] —ARK
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By heterochromatic, April 22, 2012 at 8:07 pm Link to this comment
Marian—- there are some differences between private sealed communication
Report thisaddressed to a single person and internet usage that is neither private nor meet to
be really private….some forms of electronic communication DO mirror mail usage,
others do not.
By Marian Griffith, April 21, 2012 at 2:01 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
The comparison between postal act and internet delivered email is apt. Both ought to be protected from arbitrary snooping by government, and government should not seek to use it to spy indiscriminately on its population. There are laws in place that limit how and when government can intercept one’s mail and they should apply to email as well.
The problem is that the nature of electronic communication makes it so much easier to intercept and store it, and to build databases of traffic patterns.
There also is a solution that is not (yet) outlawed. Encrypting your emails and using an anonymising service effectively restores the ‘envelope’ around your electronic communication that signals where the government’s right to snoop around ends.
Report thisProblem is that is is difficult to set up and even more difficult to coordinate with others. It ought to be mandated for service providers, but with government increasingly treating its own citizens ad hostile enemy combatants and only the big corporations (who have no interest in protecting their customers when it means risking the potential ire of government) are capable of setting up the software and servers required to make this kind of anonymity universal again. And we remain easily convinced by scare stories to give up our freedoms, so outside of activist groups like the pirate party or anonymous, which are incessantly demonised by the media, there is neither understanding nor support for this issue.
We live in the world of Tsar Ivan the Terrible: Better a thousands innocents killed than one guilty man walking free. And as long as we do not end up being one of those innocents being sacrificed we all feel ‘safer’ at night for it.
By heterochromatic, April 19, 2012 at 4:46 pm Link to this comment
MIke Strong—- good thoughts, but perhaps the parallel between the unsealing
Report thisprivate correspondence in the mail is not quite exact with internet usage .
By Mike Strong, April 18, 2012 at 8:18 pm Link to this comment
Next point - After the US constitution was created the new republic (us) took another four years to come up with rules for the post office. In the Postal Act of 1792 the very sort of issues we see today were addressed including forbidding the interception of mail for intelligence purposes. It also required that all mail was delivered the same regardless of sender or receiver.
Essentially you can look at this establishing law for the Post Office as a version of net neutrality. The issues are really parallels. We should continue to uphold that 1792 law with the internet. Just because the new method of delivering “packages” (such as files/documents) and “mail” is electronic does not change the basic issues.
What electronics does is to provide much more massively invasive capabilities for anyone who wants to spy on you for any purpose. So the need to enforce the 1792 law is even more important. The irony is that when personal computers started (1977 PET and Apple II) we really thought it would be a tool for the people and for freedom.
But now we are leaving computers as such and moving the computing devices into closed-system appliances such as iPhones and iPads with iTunes. Indeed, any “smart” phone and most tablets are removed from the open kinds of production machines and open-market software. The further irony is that back then we imagined a world in which the computer would eventually become an appliance in operation. We thought that would be further freedom.
Report thisBy Mike Strong, April 18, 2012 at 8:04 pm Link to this comment
There is a basic mis-understanding in the first paragraph, a common confusion. Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the internet, he invented the World Wide Web. He wrote the original code, while with CERN, for a program he called the WorldWideWeb and he wrote the first web server which was up and running at the end of 1990. Then in 1991 he began promoting the web.
The internet is not the web, though that distinction has been fuzzed in popular usage. The web is the means of linking between resources (documents, video, etc.) which are transported across the internet (the “highway” on which the files are requested and delivered). The internet is a combination of many networks (actual hardware) connected together.
Report thisBy gerard, April 18, 2012 at 5:15 pm Link to this comment
Advice to the woebegone: Quick! Put a dinosaur’s tooth on the floor in front of the door to your study to keep the ill wind of ignorance and repression from blowing it shut. Do it now!
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