Hey, a friend sent this to me and I thought it was rather insightful
DISCLAIMER: I didn’t write this and neither did my friend, the link at the bottom is where the article originally came from. if any of the mods feel that it is unethical or potentially illegal to post this here, the by all means delete this post.
Also I searched this site and didnt find anybody that posted this, but if this article is already posted in another section here, then flame away for my stupidity.
A Net of Control
Unthinkable: How the Internet could become a tool of
corporate and government power, based on updates now
in the works
Issues 2004 - Picture, if you will, an information
infrastructure that encourages censorship,
surveillance and suppression of the creative impulse.
Where anonymity is outlawed and every penny spent is
accounted for. Where the powers that be can smother
subversive (or economically competitive) ideas in the
cradle, and no one can publish even a laundry list
without the imprimatur of Big Brother. Some
prognosticators are saying that such a construct is
nearly inevitable. And this infrastructure is none
other than the former paradise of rebels and
free-speechers: the Internet.
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To those exposed to the Panglossian euphoria of Net
enthusiasts during the 1990s, this vision seems
unbelievable. After all, wasn’t the Internet supposed
to be the defining example of empowering technology?
Freedom was allegedly built into the very bones of the
Internet, designed to withstand nuclear blasts and
dictatorial attempts at control. While this cyberslack
has its downside—porn, credit-card fraud and insincere
bids on eBay—it was considered a small price to pay
for free speech and friction-free business models. The
freedom genie was out, and no one could put it back
into the bottle.
Certainly John Walker believed all that. The hackerish
founder of the software firm Autodesk, now retired to
Switzerland to work on personal projects of his
choosing, enjoyed “unbounded optimism” that the Net
would not only offset the powers of industry and
government but actually restore some previously
threatened personal liberties. But in —the past couple
of years, he noticed a disturbing trend. Developments
in technology, law and commerce seemed to be directed
toward actually changing the open nature of the Net.
And Internet Revisited would create opportunities for
business and government to control and monitor
cyberspace.
In September Walker posted his fears in a 28,000-word
Web document called the Digital Imprimatur. The name
refers to his belief that it’s possible that nothing
would be allowed to even appear on the Internet
without having a proper technical authorization.
How could the freedom genie be shoved back into the
bottle? Basically, it’s part of a huge effort to
transform the Net from an arena where anyone can
anonymously participate to a sign-in affair where
tamperproof “digital certificates” identify who you
are. The advantages of such a system are clear: it
would eliminate identity theft and enable small,
secure electronic “microtransactions,” long a dream of
Internet commerce pioneers. (Another bonus:
arrivederci, unwelcome spam.) A concurrent step would
be the adoption of “trusted computing,” a system by
which not only people but computer programs would be
stamped with identifying marks. Those would link with
certificates that determine whether programs are
uncorrupted and cleared to run on your computer.
The best-known implementation of this scheme is the
work in progress at Microsoft known as Next Generation
Secure Computing Base (formerly called Palladium). It
will be part of Longhorn, the next big Windows
version, out in 2006. Intel and AMD are onboard to
create special secure chips that would make all
computers sold after that point secure. No more
viruses! And the addition of “digital rights
management” to movies, music and even documents
created by individuals (such protections are already
built into the recently released version of Microsoft
Office) would use the secure system to make sure that
no one can access or, potentially, even post anything
without permission.
The giants of Internet commerce are eager to see this
happen. “The social, economic and legal priorities are
going to force the Internet toward security,” says
Stratton Sclavos, CEO of VeriSign, a company built to
provide digital certificates (it also owns Network
Solutions, the exclusive handler of the “dot-com” part
of the Internet domain-name system). “It’s not going
to be all right not to know who’s on the other end of
the wire.” Governments will be able to tax
e-commerce—and dictators can keep track of who’s
saying what.
Walker isn’t the first to warn of this ominous power
shift. The Internet’s pre-eminent dean of darkness is
Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford University guru of
cyberlaw. Beginning with his 1999 book “Code and Other
Laws of Cyberspace,” Lessig has been predicting that
corporate and regulatory pressures would usurp the
open nature of the Net, and now says that he has
little reason to retract his pessimism. Lessig
understands that restrictive copyright and Homeland
Security laws give a legal rationale to “total
control,” and also knows that it will be sold to the
people as a great way to stop thieves, pirates,
malicious hackers, spammers and child pornographers.
“To say we need total freedom isn’t going to win,”
Lessig says. He is working hard to promote
alternatives in which the law can be enforced outside
the actual architecture of the system itself but
admits that he considers his own efforts somewhat
quixotic.
Does this mean that John Walker’s nightmare is a
foregone conclusion? Not necessarily. Certain
influential companies are beginning to understand that
their own businesses depend on an open Internet.
(Google, for example, is dependent on the ability to
image the Web on its own servers, a task that might be
impossible in a controlled Internet.) Activist groups
like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are sounding
alarms. A few legislators like Sens. Sam Brownback of
Kansas and Norm Coleman of Minnesota are beginning to
look upon digital rights management schemes with
skepticism. Courts might balk if the restrictions
clearly violate the First Amendment. And there are
pockets of technologists concocting schemes that may
be able to bypass even a rigidly controlled Internet.
In one paper published by, of all people, some of
Microsoft’s Palladium developers, there’s discussion
of a scenario where small private “dark nets” can
freely move data in a hostile environment. Picture
digital freedom fighters huddling in the electronic
equivalent of caves, file-swapping and blogging under
the radar of censors and copyright cops.
Nonetheless, staving off the Internet power shift will
be a difficult task, made even harder by apathy on the
part of users who won’t know what they’ve got till
it’s gone. “I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to
people about this,” says Walker. “And I can’t think of
a single person who is actually going to do something
about it.” Unfortunately, our increasingly
Internet-based society will get only the freedom it
fights for.
http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3606168&p1=0
Besides, almost all servers use Intel or AMD chips.
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