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Shitshitshitshitshit! I knew that this would be the knee-jerk reaction of politicians. If this happens, we will get borders on the internet. And if there is any

Shitshitshitshitshit! I knew that this would be the knee-jerk reaction of politicians. If this happens, we will get borders on the internet. And if there is anything which can wreck the internet, borders are it. Now for the first time I'm really scared about the future of the internet. Let's get involved politically now and educate these people about the foundations of the internet, and try to keep it a neutral piece of infrastructure. Curse the NSA for wrecking net neutrality, and other agencies for waging war here. The internet was international and neutral from the start, don't bring your territorial thinking here!

mpyne 13y ago
> If this happens, we will get borders on the internet. And if there is anything which can wreck the internet, borders are it. No offense but this is exactly the option I'd be recommending to U.S. policymakers (i.e. having a "Balkanization Button") if it really comes to gutting the NSA. Yes, the thing that makes the Internet so good for us is the open borders, but it's also the thing that makes it so powerful for countries that don't have to abide by pesky little things like Western cultural morals. In no other realm does a potential adversary gain access to a military capability and the Western world opts to leave itself defenseless. And make no mistake, cyber is thought to be a military capability for the likes of Russia (just ask Estonia or Georgia), China, and North Korea. If pacifism is to be the answer in response to this threat, then that simply means that defense will have to come by different means, i.e. by "battening down the hatches" and sealing off foreigners from domestic networks. If we can seek out threats on networks then the second-best option is to try and keep our networks from being used against us. Similar logic will then apply in the E.U. and other nations. > The internet was international and neutral from the start, don't bring your territorial thinking here! It was hardly neutral from the start, the Internet developed from things like NSFNET and MILNET. Don't be silly. And either way, "we didn't start the fire"... the NSA didn't invent cyber hacking, as they could only have been hacking themselves at first. Go read "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll if you want to see where the first wave of state-sponsored hacking started.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  We don't have to sever all the transoceanic cables to protect sensitive networks from foreign intrusion, we just have to stop plugging them into the Internet in the first place.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Which is, itself, Balkanization. It also entirely defeats the idea of having a domestic Internet in the first place. Do you not know of anyone who VPNs into their work intranet over the public Internet? Even the government does that.
- strictfp 13y ago
  Please remember that Germany voluntarily shared their surveillance data with the US, at least according to Snowden. So a country subnet wouldn't have helped at all in this case. Regarding cyber warfare, maybe the US didn't start this fire, but they definitely participated in bringing war mentality online. I hope that we as a technological community can fight this on a global scale, not nation per nation. Abusing the internet for espionage and warfare sucks. If we can strengthen security for any arbitrary connection we won't have to divide the whole net into silos. Here, the NSA were really acting against their best interest by weakening existing defenses. Having several barriers of entry is good practice in security, why not just make sure that there are secured channels with stronger security for sensitive data. We already know that many systems can be improved security-wise, so we'd know where to start! These secured channels most definitely don't have to be by country, and internet could stay as is for everyday communications. I believe that having an international net greatly helps in preventing wars by building relations between entities in different countries and spreading culture. Let's not forget about the negative effects that would come from shutting this system down by introducing country-nets.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    > I hope that we as a technological community can fight this on a global scale, not nation per nation. Abusing the internet for espionage and warfare sucks. I agree 100%, but the problem is we don't get a unilateral vote. Geopolitically it makes perfect sense for authoritarian regimes to engage in cyberwar. All legality aside, they would be stupid not to. There is not much anyone (UN, EU, etc.) can do about it. We're not going to declare war (in the kinetic sense) over the cyber equivalent of spying/covert ops. We're not going to engage in sanctions that strangle both our economies over the cyber equivalent of spying/covert ops. And they know that, just as well as we do. There is every incentive for them to do it, and essentially no disincentive. So the cyberwar is on. (And, it's been on). And that's not even getting into the transnational actors who abuse seams and gaps of jurisdictional boundaries between law enforcement, national intelligence, "dual-use" civilian/military networks, etc. in order to organize their own activities. The best thing we can do is extremely good defense (which due to scale must be mostly passive with few active measures employed). And we should pursue that, but market pressures will always, always go against that. Even if the U.S. were to, say, regulate that computer systems should be designed to combat security vulnerabilities (and NIST has just released a guideline on that), other nations would not necessarily do that and so nations without that requirement could run rings around U.S. software shops by releasing buggier software first and with faster feature iteration cycles. And that's assuming you could "fix the market" with proper regulation in the first place, which is certainly unclear. And where would open source software fall into that? Do we want to forbid individual devs from uploading their wares to GitHub until they've completely a 27-page checklist? > Here, the NSA were really acting against their best interest by weakening existing defenses. In fairness AFAICS the one crypto standard they weakened was only weakened against NSA, not in general (though that would certainly not make you feel better if you were trying to hide from NSA). But at the same time I never figured out specifics on whether NSA was convincing companies to ship known-broken code, actively adding other backdoors, or what. But if their involvement was limited to convincing companies like Cisco to default to Dual EC DRBG then that's not nearly as bad as convincing Cisco to ship a broken zlib. > Having several barriers of entry is good practice in security, why not just make sure that there are secured channels with stronger security for sensitive data. Even without market pressures, the fact is that cyber defense falls prey to the fact that the attacker generally need only be right once, which the defender must be right every time. I hate to be Debbie Downer here but you're speaking to an extremely hard problem, and it doesn't get any easier if you take all the other possible tools away. Certainly there are industries taking more stringent precautions, but the problem is that the bum-standard civilian Internet is itself "critical infrastructure", and is the hardest thing to make secure (just witness the spread of NTP-based DDoS attacks). Having citadels of security in a floating maelstrom of unprotected Internet is not security at the national level. > I believe that having an international net greatly helps in preventing wars by building relations between entities in different countries and spreading culture. Let's not forget about the negative effects that would come from shutting this system down by introducing country-nets. Well a counterargument is that an international net has allowed smart propaganda arms from all sources to drum up more hatred for America (I'm not speaking merely of things America deserves and should receive blame for.... e.g. both sides in Egypt blamed America and thought America was supporting the other). To be clear, neither the U.S. media or government has managed to engage in "smart" propaganda since the Cold War and the Internet has made the USG in particular look flat-footed. Look around the Internet and all I see is Europeans calling us fat, making fun of how we measure distance, write and speak our dates (and all this despite American coders at MS being careful to add locale and translation support to their software), and more or less begging for us to take any overseas extension we have back to America. While I will say that I do prefer an international, open network just as you do, those demanding America to go home may yet get their wish......

mpyne 13y ago

> If this happens, we will get borders on the internet. And if there is anything which can wreck the internet, borders are it. No offense but this is exactly the option I'd be recommending to U.S. policymakers (i.e. having a "Balkanization Button") if it really comes to gutting the NSA. Yes, the thing that makes the Internet so good for us is the open borders, but it's also the thing that makes it so powerful for countries that don't have to abide by pesky little things like Western cultural morals. In no other realm does a potential adversary gain access to a military capability and the Western world opts to leave itself defenseless. And make no mistake, cyber is thought to be a military capability for the likes of Russia (just ask Estonia or Georgia), China, and North Korea. If pacifism is to be the answer in response to this threat, then that simply means that defense will have to come by different means, i.e. by "battening down the hatches" and sealing off foreigners from domestic networks. If we can seek out threats on networks then the second-best option is to try and keep our networks from being used against us. Similar logic will then apply in the E.U. and other nations. > The internet was international and neutral from the start, don't bring your territorial thinking here! It was hardly neutral from the start, the Internet developed from things like NSFNET and MILNET. Don't be silly. And either way, "we didn't start the fire"... the NSA didn't invent cyber hacking, as they could only have been hacking themselves at first. Go read "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll if you want to see where the first wave of state-sponsored hacking started.

nitrogen 13y ago
We don't have to sever all the transoceanic cables to protect sensitive networks from foreign intrusion, we just have to stop plugging them into the Internet in the first place.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Which is, itself, Balkanization. It also entirely defeats the idea of having a domestic Internet in the first place. Do you not know of anyone who VPNs into their work intranet over the public Internet? Even the government does that.
strictfp 13y ago
Please remember that Germany voluntarily shared their surveillance data with the US, at least according to Snowden. So a country subnet wouldn't have helped at all in this case. Regarding cyber warfare, maybe the US didn't start this fire, but they definitely participated in bringing war mentality online. I hope that we as a technological community can fight this on a global scale, not nation per nation. Abusing the internet for espionage and warfare sucks. If we can strengthen security for any arbitrary connection we won't have to divide the whole net into silos. Here, the NSA were really acting against their best interest by weakening existing defenses. Having several barriers of entry is good practice in security, why not just make sure that there are secured channels with stronger security for sensitive data. We already know that many systems can be improved security-wise, so we'd know where to start! These secured channels most definitely don't have to be by country, and internet could stay as is for everyday communications. I believe that having an international net greatly helps in preventing wars by building relations between entities in different countries and spreading culture. Let's not forget about the negative effects that would come from shutting this system down by introducing country-nets.
- mpyne 13y ago
  > I hope that we as a technological community can fight this on a global scale, not nation per nation. Abusing the internet for espionage and warfare sucks. I agree 100%, but the problem is we don't get a unilateral vote. Geopolitically it makes perfect sense for authoritarian regimes to engage in cyberwar. All legality aside, they would be stupid not to. There is not much anyone (UN, EU, etc.) can do about it. We're not going to declare war (in the kinetic sense) over the cyber equivalent of spying/covert ops. We're not going to engage in sanctions that strangle both our economies over the cyber equivalent of spying/covert ops. And they know that, just as well as we do. There is every incentive for them to do it, and essentially no disincentive. So the cyberwar is on. (And, it's been on). And that's not even getting into the transnational actors who abuse seams and gaps of jurisdictional boundaries between law enforcement, national intelligence, "dual-use" civilian/military networks, etc. in order to organize their own activities. The best thing we can do is extremely good defense (which due to scale must be mostly passive with few active measures employed). And we should pursue that, but market pressures will always, always go against that. Even if the U.S. were to, say, regulate that computer systems should be designed to combat security vulnerabilities (and NIST has just released a guideline on that), other nations would not necessarily do that and so nations without that requirement could run rings around U.S. software shops by releasing buggier software first and with faster feature iteration cycles. And that's assuming you could "fix the market" with proper regulation in the first place, which is certainly unclear. And where would open source software fall into that? Do we want to forbid individual devs from uploading their wares to GitHub until they've completely a 27-page checklist? > Here, the NSA were really acting against their best interest by weakening existing defenses. In fairness AFAICS the one crypto standard they weakened was only weakened against NSA, not in general (though that would certainly not make you feel better if you were trying to hide from NSA). But at the same time I never figured out specifics on whether NSA was convincing companies to ship known-broken code, actively adding other backdoors, or what. But if their involvement was limited to convincing companies like Cisco to default to Dual EC DRBG then that's not nearly as bad as convincing Cisco to ship a broken zlib. > Having several barriers of entry is good practice in security, why not just make sure that there are secured channels with stronger security for sensitive data. Even without market pressures, the fact is that cyber defense falls prey to the fact that the attacker generally need only be right once, which the defender must be right every time. I hate to be Debbie Downer here but you're speaking to an extremely hard problem, and it doesn't get any easier if you take all the other possible tools away. Certainly there are industries taking more stringent precautions, but the problem is that the bum-standard civilian Internet is itself "critical infrastructure", and is the hardest thing to make secure (just witness the spread of NTP-based DDoS attacks). Having citadels of security in a floating maelstrom of unprotected Internet is not security at the national level. > I believe that having an international net greatly helps in preventing wars by building relations between entities in different countries and spreading culture. Let's not forget about the negative effects that would come from shutting this system down by introducing country-nets. Well a counterargument is that an international net has allowed smart propaganda arms from all sources to drum up more hatred for America (I'm not speaking merely of things America deserves and should receive blame for.... e.g. both sides in Egypt blamed America and thought America was supporting the other). To be clear, neither the U.S. media or government has managed to engage in "smart" propaganda since the Cold War and the Internet has made the USG in particular look flat-footed. Look around the Internet and all I see is Europeans calling us fat, making fun of how we measure distance, write and speak our dates (and all this despite American coders at MS being careful to add locale and translation support to their software), and more or less begging for us to take any overseas extension we have back to America. While I will say that I do prefer an international, open network just as you do, those demanding America to go home may yet get their wish......