Diplomatic WikiLeaks

[contadino]

Forget all the playing with words.

Surely SOMEONE here understands what I mean when I say that The Establishment will now start a process of bringing the Internet "under control"?

Some of you must have been security cleared for your work. You may have an idea of what I mean.

I understand what you're saying, but I don't think it could happen (at least in the West.) The internet couldn't be locked down.

As an example, look at torrenting. ISPs have tried to block tracker sites, so the torrenting community implemented DHT. So ISPs focused on packet profiling, and the torrenting community came up with various ways of combatting that. It's just a game of cat & mouse, but instead of the cat playing with one mouse, it's playing with millions. Sure it might get one from time to time, but millions will get away with it.

Whatever steps governments take to combat what they consider to be malicious use of the internet, they will be slow to implement, and the internet community will react far quicker.

Besides, the internet is now fundamental to the economy, and we all know how precious that is to TPTB.

[caspian]

every thinking person should be supporting WikiLeaks and fighting the false charges of rape against the founder of WikiLeaks.

Stop that right now. It's really quite outrageous and sickeningly misogynist of you to call these allegations of rape "false" when you have NO proof of that. Let justice take its course. Assange may or may not be guilty, but that's for a jury to decide. I for one really hope he's not guilty, but that's just a hope, not reality.

Stop speculating and behaving in a disgraceful manner. It's bad enough that some bloggers have plastered these women's names and faces all over the internet, and even speculated on their sexual orientation. You should be ashamed of yourself for joining in the witch hunt.

[Vortex]

Besides, the internet is now fundamental to the economy, and we all know how precious that is to TPTB.

Exactly ... and the Payback crowd took down MasterCard!

This is the Web equivalent of blocking a motorway or blocking Oxford Street.

These physical actions would not be tolerated in the physical world - and you might even be jailed.

Until now the virtual world has not had similar protection ... but do you think that the credit card companies, their retailers and probably most of their card users will ignore what has happened? I fear not.

There will be many meetings going on around the world today discussing the options to protect global e-commerce which employs millions & is used by billions from damage caused by a few thousand protestors.

The world is about to grow up.

The Internet playground is about to be turned into a corporate and/or state controlled zone ... all because a handful of boys pooed in a corner and then another group of naughty boys threw stones at some passers-by who protested.

[contadino]

Besides, the internet is now fundamental to the economy, and we all know how precious that is to TPTB.

Exactly ... and the Payback crowd took down MasterCard!

This is the Web equivalent of blocking a motorway or blocking Oxford Street.

These physical actions would not be tolerated in the physical world - and you might even be jailed.

Until now the virtual world has not had similar protection ...

Oh rubbish. Identity theft wasn't an issue until 10 years ago, now it is a multi-billion dollar industry. Just in the UK, the price of building the government gateway ran into the tens of millions. How much have banks paid to try and secure their services? Chip & PIN?

And what has happened since? Dig out that post from JohnB about the thing that can scan cards whilst they're still in your pocket.

Yes, what Anonymous is doing is illegal, but do they care? I think they're too desperate & disgruntled to worry about the slim chance of them being caught.

ETA: And how many truck drivers were arrested for bringing the M1, the M4, the M25, and the M6 to a standstill during the fuel protests a few years ago?

[UndercoverElephant]

China manages (sort of) to control its networks.

Yes, but only at the cost of stifling all sorts of private enterprise. China plays by its own rules, certainly regarding control of information flow, but they are only able to do this because they are a non-democratic country where the state always retained certain controls that were lost long ago in the West.

It's effective - my daughter worked in China and says that the normal person has NO idea of what REALLY happens outside china.

Yes, but this is a one-way transition. Once people have had access to free information about the outside world, you cannot go back to being like China.

The side effect of this will be increased control and monitoring of OUR Web use.

It CANNOT be controlled. It is politically impossible, and the harder people try to impose such control, the harder the hackers and crackers will try to find ways to get round it. You can't monitor everything everybody is doing either, because of the sheer volume of information which would have to be intercepted, decoded, evaluated and stored.

[caspian]

The Internet playground is about to be turned into a corporate and/or state controlled zone ... all because a handful of boys pooed in a corner and then another group of naughty boys threw stones at some passers-by who protested.

Where have you been for the last 15 years? Didn't you notice the corporate takeover of the web?

You still haven't explained how TPTB will "control" the internet. You mentioned China's attempt, which only partially succeeds because there are any number of ways around their controls.

[UndercoverElephant]

The Internet playground is about to be turned into a corporate and/or state controlled zone ... all because a handful of boys pooed in a corner and then another group of naughty boys threw stones at some passers-by who protested.

No it isn't, Vortex. Contadino explained the situation perfectly. The western powers-that-be would dearly love to be able to control the internet but it is simply not possible for them to do so for a whole slew of reasons, the two most important of which are (a) the inability of TPTB to keep up with reality of what is happening online and (b) the dependency of "the economy" on keeping the internet freely available. It's not "the world" that is about to be forced to "grow up"; it is those people who currently rely on the general public not having access to this sort of information who are going to have to adjust to the new reality.

Control of information flows and real power have, for most of human history, been the same thing.

[woodpecker]

China manages (sort of) to control its networks.

It's effective - my daughter worked in China and says that the normal person has NO idea of what REALLY happens outside china.

I think Australia planned a similar control of ISPs ... and everyone, quite rightly, had a good grump.

However NOW many people will SUPPORT blocks/walls etc on the web.

Would you be happy having queued for half an hour only to find that you can't use your credit card because of "those bloody hackers"?

Intelligent traffic management by ISPs could track and block all sorts of activity. The hardware (Deep Packet Inspection) is already there in many cases.

Legal rather than technical changes will also help: "So you set up a bot for use by the protestors? That's illegal - have this £5000 fine."

Example of possible pain coming: I use various private TCP & UDP protocols between various sites - I now imagine that ISPs might start blocking my 'unexpected' traffic, which will be a royal nuisance.

Sure, we will never block all protestors ... but the ISPs, governments etc now have an excuse to get their toys out of the cupboard.

One thing: hardly anything is truly anonymous on the Web. If you send a blackmail email, however cunningly routed, you will probably be caught. At the moment this takes quite a lot of time and so would not be done for trivial cases. However the combination of enhanced laws plus better tools to find the sender of emails or the operator of a DDOS bot PC will take a fair number of protestors off line.

The side effect of this will be increased control and monitoring of OUR Web use.

Ignoring the validity of WikiLeaks / Payback, all this is a total dog's breakfast which will eventually affect us all.

The average person in China is really not interested in what goes on outside China. They have a different view. But it's easy enough in China to find stuff that you want to (on different domain names), where that stuff was originally posted on blocked sites.

Australian governments are something else. Let's not go there.

I don't agree that many will support blocks/walls. Many will support better protection of *crucial* information (i.e. protecting the systems that info is on - which most governments are so bad at). But that's exactly what a lot of us would want. And many will now understand that not all secrets are really secrets.

DPI is already installed at most if not all ISPs. Perhaps the last to install here was O2 (beginning of this year). They already do 'traffic shaping', they already discriminate against particular protocols, often for straight commercial reasons. The issue of net neutrality was already being played out both here and in the US long before WikiLeaks released any footage from Iraq.

Increased control and monitoring? Have you been watching government (this one, the last one, the American one) plans on a whole range of fronts long before this happened? It's been going on for years, and shows no sign of abating in the face of reduced budgets. I won't provide a long list of acronyms. (And when the ISPs squeal 'we can't because it's too difficult/will cost us too much', the government handily says it will do it all for them. Nice.) Collecting information, monitoring and controlling is what government agencies always end up wanting to do.

At least there are now consumer lobby groups on both sides of the pond that aim to defend our interests in these areas (and who are also against DDoS and similar). Perhaps worth signing up to them?

And again, WikiLeaks is nothing to do with Payback. Different people. Not sure why you keep conflating the two.

[Vortex]

And how many truck drivers were arrested for bringing the M1, the M4, the M25, and the M6 to a standstill during the fuel protests a few years ago?

The law was changed so future protestors could have their vehicles seized.
It worked: how many similar protests have you seen since?

Similar laws could be quietly introduced onto the Web: if you use your PC for a bot net then you lose your connection and receive a fine.

Mummy & Daddy would then ensure than little Damian wasn't seeting up such a system on his notebook PC ... or at least they would after the first fine!

Or maybe a Web ASBO could be introduced?

Sudden thought: the music industry must be rubbing their hands with glee - they might now receive a LOT more support from governments.

[woodpecker]

Besides, the internet is now fundamental to the economy, and we all know how precious that is to TPTB.

Exactly ... and the Payback crowd took down MasterCard!

This is the Web equivalent of blocking a motorway or blocking Oxford Street.

These physical actions would not be tolerated in the physical world - and you might even be jailed.

Until now the virtual world has not had similar protection ...

Oh rubbish. Identity theft wasn't an issue until 10 years ago, now it is a multi-billion dollar industry. Just in the UK, the price of building the government gateway ran into the tens of millions. How much have banks paid to try and secure their services? Chip & PIN?

And what has happened since? Dig out that post from JohnB about the thing that can scan cards whilst they're still in your pocket.

Yes.

Card companies spend on prevention in exact proportion to their own perceived losses (not their customers' losses). No more, no less. It's a commercial decision. The reason why they have spent so little (effort, resources) to date is that the losses are - in their greater scheme - quite piddling.

The Payback crew took down Verified by Visa and part of Mastercard for.... 60 minutes?

[Vortex]

And again, WikiLeaks is nothing to do with Payback. Different people. Not sure why you keep conflating the two.

I know what they are.

However to the general public they are all part of the same crowd.

This is one of the main points of my argument. The general public and the politicians will NOT know the fine detail. They will simply want the naughty children smacked. (Oops, that's covered in another thread ..)

[woodpecker]

China manages (sort of) to control its networks.

It's effective - my daughter worked in China and says that the normal person has NO idea of what REALLY happens outside china.

My experience has been, for example, that while twitter.com may be blocked, every single twitter client I've tried to use there works fine, none of them are blocked. So using twitter is not a problem. And that is with a Chinese really concerned about social media as a tool for allowing people to organise.

YouTube is often blocked, but YT videos are available on other Chinese-language sites (which I used to show someone in China the whole Susan Boyle thing ). No problems using search engines, web-based email clients etc etc. The BBC site gets blocked occasionally when it runs a news story perceived as anti-China, and then gets unblocked. The whole of Wikipedia is available to all, as far as I could figure out (I couldn't find anything on Wikipedia that wasn't displaying).

(And offline, Chinese people do have access to *some* Western TV, but pretty restricted. They will proudly show you what they *can* access.)

Do you think that Western IT and other firms would be able to have major operations in China if there was a complete lockdown?

As with many censorship situations, much censorship in China is self-censorship: people don't go there, just in case. That's the most dangerous kind of all.

[woodpecker]

Sudden thought: the music industry must be rubbing their hands with glee - they might now receive a LOT more support from governments.

That was maybe a bit of a daft thought. Since when have either the US or UK governments not *massively* supported the music industry??!! In the UK, the government even published a parliamentary Bill that was drafted by the BPI! (MS Word > document authors).

And haven't you checked out the US govt cables WRT Spain, Sweden etc. It's all about getting changes through their parliaments to suit US music industry interests! It's been going on for at least seven years.

[Vortex]

Anyway, we aren't getting very far here.

You all tell me that the Web will remain as it is, unpoliced and a great place of freedom just like the Wild West once was.

Apparently nothing will change and the roaming rugged cowboys will fend off all attempts at control.

Of course the Wild West is now full of fast food joints and the cowboys have mostly gone.

There are THOUSANDS of Sheriffs and Deputies out there now too.

As we speak there are probably HUNDREDS of people in meetings discussing what to do about WikiLeaks and Payback in particular, and the future security of the web in general.

All this activity will certainly result in changes to our legal frameworks and also technical changes to the Internet.

No amount of wishful thinking about the sanctity of Web freedom will stop these people implementing their changes.

Of course the true hacker will find ways to work around the blocks - it's the rest of us who will suffer.

Essentially all-out war has been declared between the cyber-freedom crowd and the State. In fact against ALL the Nation States.

I think that the big boys will win.

[woodpecker]

Anyway, we aren't getting very far here.

You all tell me that the Web will remain as it is, unpoliced and a great place of freedom just like the Wild West once was.

No, I'm saying that battles are already playing out about all of these issues, and have been doing so for several years: net neutrality, web filtering/blocking, surveillance and a long etc. People really should wake up to this.

But so far, governments have not been good at achieving a lot (slow lumbering beasts, not good at technology), while commercial operators are generally only interested in their own commercial operations. That's why we have the whole ISP monitoring position (in the UK) framed in terms of cost to the ISPs. And ISPs are just as much in danger of bumbling into commercial issues without knowing what they are doing (e.g. shaping of VOIP traffic to control Skype traffic, when there are lots of commercial users of VOIP) as anyone.

What we are likely to see is plenty of unintended consequences. So pretty much the usual.