The biggest threat the internet faces today is a push by various vested interests to kill the inherent Privacy and Anonymity that has been it’s lifeblood since inception .
Unless the world is vigilant we may one day wake up to find that we cannot access the internet without a verified ID. There have been recent moves in China mandating that people use their real names when posting on-line. This is not as difficult to enforce as it initially seems, the vast majority of Chinese access the internet though cyber-cafes . By law the owners of these venues must copy and store the ID-card of it’s patrons. Something similar could easily be done here, at the ISP level.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Facebook is secretly positioning itself to become the “Passport of the Internet”. Recent comments by Randy Zuckerbug suggesting that Anonymity on the internet “must go” only serve to highlight the position Facebook usually takes in regards to privacy.
Already many popular sites require users to “sign in with Facebook” to post comment. The pendulum is swinging in Facebook’s favour.
One day we will find a Facebook that has become the supplier of the “International Internet ID” much like Paypal has become synonymous with e-commerce. It is not far-fetched to suggest that these systems could be the result of some inter-governmental co-operation. There are many entities who will gain from the death of Internet privacy – From the Word Intellectual Property Organisation all the way up to the Police State.
Thankfully we are not entirely defenceless. The Free Software world has been working on building the foundations necessary to combat the eventual (and current) encroachments on our liberties for some time now. You may be familiar with the cyrpto-anarchist world outlook. In hindsight these people were (and still are) surprisingly visionary in their view. Wikileaks found its initial seed of inspiration from the crypto-anarchist philosophy, In some way wikileaks, in turn, has become their flagship symbol.
Recent events in the middle east (The liberation of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and soon many more) have proven what a powerful tool the internet, when coupled with anonymity and security, can be. These revolutions would have been impossible 20 years ago.
A foundation pillar of the internet is secure encryption.
In 1991, a Computer Scientist, Phil Zimmermann created an encryption/decryption algorithm called “PGP” (Pretty Good Privacy). Don’t let the name fool you – if used properly pgp is a bullet proof way of keeping files private. To date it has not been compromised.
At the time, the level of encryption pgp provided was classed as “Military Grade”. This meant the algorithm could not be published outside the US. Due to the nature of the internet, this was virtually impossible for the author to enforce. So, in a move proving to the world how ineffectual legislation is when dealing with the internet, Zimmermann was charged with “munitions export without a license”.
Zimmermann, decided to use a legal loop-hole to distribute his code, relying on the first amendment (the one about freedom of expression) he self-published a book containing the source-code of the the pgp program. Anyone with access to a scanner and OCR software could effectively compile and run the code. The charges were dropped before the loophole could be tested in court (so don’t try that at home, unless you enjoy expensive legal battles).
The software may still be illegal, depending on your country, as an example Pakistan has recently banned ALL forms on encryption.
I have created a silent video guide , showing how to use the open source (GPL) implementation of pgp (now an IEEE standard). The program is called GnuPG . It focues on simple (but effectual) usage.
Please enjoy, share and ammend.
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