Father Of The World Wide Web Calls for Constitution to Address 'Insidious and Chilling Spying'

[G_j]

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/berners-lee-calls-internet-constitution-address-insidious-chilling-spying-1439902

The man known as the father of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has spoken on the 25th anniversary of the day the idea of his era-defining technology was first mooted, to call for a global constitution for the web.

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25 years on and that technology has radically changed the way the world communicates, but now it is time for governments around the world to protect their citizens by drawing up a charter for the internet, according to Berners-Lee.

"We need a global constitution – a bill of rights" Berners-Lee told the Guardian.

<snip>

Since Edward Snowden began leaking top-secret documents about how the US and UK government agencies monitor and collect personal data from people all over the world, internet users have been reassessing how they use the web.

NSA's Insidious and chilling spying

Berners-Lee has been an outspoken critic of the actions of the NSA and GCHQ. While he remains of the belief that the internet is a "tremendously positive force" he openly admits to the "seriousness" of the situation relating to the revelations made by Snowden.

Calling the government monitoring of citizens "insidious" and "chilling", Berners-Lee said last November at the launch of the annual Web Index report:

"When you are being spied on by an oppressive government where they don't believe that you have the right to be able to go [online] and discuss with impunity [sensitive topics]; when you are being spied on; when maybe you have known people who have been taken off to jail in the middle of the night; that is pretty chilling.

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http://news.yahoo.com/tim-berners-lees-message-webs-25th-anniversary-111316706.html;_ylt=AwrBEiFTaSBTvy8AUBXQtDMD

A website commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Web has gone live Wednesday, March 12, with support from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the World Wide Web Foundation. The site honors the day in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee proposed the system of hypertext links that would become the internet as we know it today. On the occasion, the computer scientist has launched a call to action to ensure the Web remains open and accessible to all.

Tim Berners-Lee, the W3C and the World Wide Web Foundation solemnly urge internet users everywhere to do their part to protect and develop an open and free internet in 2014. In a video at webat25.org, Berners-Lee expresses his hope that "the anniversary will spark a global conversation about our need to defend principles that have made the Web successful, and to unlock the Web's untapped potential."

"I believe we can build a Web that truly is for everyone," he states, "one that is accessible to all, from any device, and one that empowers all of us to achieve our dignity, rights and potential as humans."

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[Ichingcarpenter]

1. I posted this too

but yours has a better title so I'll kick and nominate yours.

[G_j]

2. either way

it hasn't generated a lot of interest so far. Hopefully it will.

[1awake]

4. I think the issue is we can't even get supposed left wing people on this site

to agree to these things let alone any government. I completely agree with him but that and $1.50 will buy me a cup of coffee. What is there to do?

[G_j]

5. it sort of reminds of the climate "debate"

just keep on arguing about it, and avoid doing anything about it..

[1awake]

6. That's axactly what is going to happen...errr... continue to happen.

It's quite disgusting really. Once again, it will be all about attacking the messenger while ignoring the message.

[woo me with science]

3. K&R

[mindwalker_i]

7. It seems to me that, unfortunately, spying of people on the net

is just way too easy to do. Laws don't help because, at least in this country, the government finds ways to go around those laws, or they just ignore the laws altogether and nobody does anything about it anyway. Then even the "good guys" make it retroactively legal. And I don't imagine it's a whole lot different in other countries - it's just too easy to pull and log the data from routers and store it.

There may be some technical things that could be done that could make it just a whole lot harder. One possibility that occurred to me was to have systems where people connect to that take the requests of multiple connections, bundle them together and encrypt the whole stream, then send those requests to other systems. Those system would unencrypt the bundle, make the requests to the target sites, get the results back, and re-bundle and re-encrypt them. The results would be sent back to the first system, then sent on to the original requestors of the data. Kind of a combination of NAT (network address translation) with encrypting and bundling requests so it a lot harder to figure out where every request came from.

The obvious point of attack on this type of system would be the bundling systems. Hopefully they wouldn't be running Windows, but that's only the first and most obvious thing to worry about.

[cprise]

12. On I2P, every user is a 'bundling' system

http://geti2p.net

It has a distributed messaging system built-in now. There is no email "server" that can be attacked or confiscated.

The Tor network also has 'bundling' (which is known as "onion routing&quot although its opt-in and less comprehensive than I2P in that respect.

[Octafish]

8. Kick for a Digital Magna Carta.

I'd never kick the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, but I would like to see what they mean become universal kick.

[cascadiance]

9. And they might split those against spying and those wanting to get rid of corporate personhood

... as a part of overturning the damaging effects of Citizen's United.

The PTB probably know that if Citizen's United and corporate personhood are overturned by constitutional amendment or whatever other means, and it is not carefully worded enough, that corporations like Google will throw up their hands and say something like "Well now that we're no longer persons, we can no longer use our corporate right to privacy to protect us from the government coming in and looking at all of our data." which many of them are probably hoping that many of those of us who are also against domestic spying might break away from the overturn Citizen's United movement if they feel their personal data on these servers is more victim to government spying then, and pit these two efforts against each other to try and split the voting populace to maintain their control over us with the corporate corrupted government still in charge.

It is important that if we redefine the fourth amendment to encompass the internet properly, that we define that the owners of the private data being held on servers such as Googles is OURS to protect and find a means that allows these businesses to do business and still protect the privacy of us as citizen's data that we provide to them as a part of doing business on their sites without them having to claim that corporate personhood is a necessary element to protect OUR private information there.

If we update the fourth amendment, we really need a separate technical committee/organization that's accountable directly to us to help shape how the rules are set up so that it can't be corrupted by the corporate 1% leadership and have any constitutional amendment (either to update the 4th amendment, or to overturn Citizen's United) work for us and not for the 1%. It needs to be worded simply so that it doesn't need constant modification in a changing world, but strongly so that it can't be manipulated to work against us as things change down the road as well.

[undeterred]

10. I would like to hear from the guy who invented the internet too.

&feature=player_detailpage

[cprise]

11. K&R