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"Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe...and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies" Whoa

"Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe...and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies" Whoa horsey. The author is making the same mistake as he accuses the press of: missing the story. If you want a good repeat-after-me line, repeat after me: "this has nothing to do with the NSA either" All intelligence agencies are either doing this or have plans to do it -- including lots of European ones which are breaking their own laws while doing so. That's yet another shoe that hasn't dropped. Who knows how long it'll take for our European friends to figure it out. Might be a while. But the larger point is valid: the internet as a conduit between a person and the larger world is a cesspool of corporate and government eavesdroppers. We're not operating the net: the net is monitoring our thoughts and recording them for others to inspect at their leisure. This is not a good thing. So the story isn't Snowden, and it's not the NSA either. It's what has become of the dream that was the internet, and the question of whether anybody is left that cares enough about privacy and anonymity to do something about it.

br78 13y ago
Your European friends have a long tradition of being skeptical of their governments too. The 'conversation' Naughton is referring to here will be between nation states about who exactly is most capably operating the implements of surveillance society. It falls to the citizens to try and drag those implements off their governments. I'm not sure if they collectively have the will for that tussle though.
adestefan 13y ago
You do realize that "the dream that was the internet" was so governments could maybe still communicate after they blasted each other back to the stone age?
- fsck--off 13y ago
  From a footnote (#5) on "Brief History of the Internet": "It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks." http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/histor...

br78 13y ago

Your European friends have a long tradition of being skeptical of their governments too. The 'conversation' Naughton is referring to here will be between nation states about who exactly is most capably operating the implements of surveillance society. It falls to the citizens to try and drag those implements off their governments. I'm not sure if they collectively have the will for that tussle though.

adestefan 13y ago

You do realize that "the dream that was the internet" was so governments could maybe still communicate after they blasted each other back to the stone age?

fsck--off 13y ago
From a footnote (#5) on "Brief History of the Internet": "It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks." http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/histor...