Time For Internet Engineers To Fight Back Against The “Surveillance Internet”

Amid torrent of revelations that the NSA finds mass surveillance easy, the IETF ponders how to harden the Internet.

Will the usually obscure Internet Engineering Task Force – that open-to-anyone group of engineers who design and keep the ‘net functioning – step up and fight back against mass surveillance? That possibility is now in the air, following a talk in Vancouver today by cryptographer Bruce Schneier (see “Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying is Making us Less Safe”). He laid partial responsibility of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance on the IETF’s doorstep.

“Fundamentally, surveillance is a business model of the Internet. The NSA didn’t wake up and say: ‘Let’s just spy on everybody, it said: ‘Wow, corporations are spying on everybody, let’s get ourselves a copy,’ ” he said, referring to the cloud computing providers and others who warehouse data. The NSA found the Internet quite easy to tap in various places; as a result, “The NSA has turned the Internet into a giant surveillance platform” that is robust both politically, legally, and technologically, he added.