The Internet With A Human Face - Beyond Tellerrand 2014 Conference Talk || Maciej Ceglowski

Maciej Ceglowski:

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Over the past year, we’ve learned a lot about the extent to which the American government monitors the Internet.



It's been amusing to watch Silicon Valley clutch its pearls and express shock that the government would dare to collect the same data as private industry.

You could argue (and I do!) that this data is actually safer in government hands. In the US, at least, there's no restriction on what companies can do with our private information, while there are stringent limits (in theory) on our government. And the NSA’s servers are certainly less likely to get hacked by some kid in Minsk.



But I understand that the government has guns and police and the power to put us in jail. It is legitimately frightening to have the government spying on all its citizens. What I take issue with is the idea that you can have different kinds of mass surveillance.

If these vast databases are valuable enough, it doesn't matter who they belong to. The government will always find a way to query them. Who pays for the servers is just an implementation detail.

It's romantic to think about cable taps and hacked routers, but history shows us that all an interested government has to do is ask. The word 'terrorism' is an open sesame that opens any doors. Look what happened with telecoms under the Bush administration. The NSA asked for permission to tap phone networks, and every American telecom except one said "no problem—let me help you rack those servers". Their only concern was to make sure they got immunity against lawsuits.



The relationship between the intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley has historically been very cozy. The former head of Facebook security now works at NSA. Dropbox just added Condoleeeza Rice, an architect of the Iraq war, to its board of directors. Obama has private fundraisers with the same people who are supposed to champion our privacy. There is not a lot of daylight between the American political Establishment and the Internet establishment. Whatever their politics, these people are on the same team.


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via DF