[P2P-F] Fwd: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Internet under threat - can US Congress defend against Obama-Stasi state and Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft

Wed Jul 31 17:36:59 CEST 2013

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From: peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 1:58 PM
Subject: Fwd: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Internet under threat - can US Congress
defend against Obama-Stasi state and Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple
and Microsoft
To: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>, Orsan Senalp <
orsan1234 at gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
Date: Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 5:31 AM
Subject: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Internet under threat - can US Congress defend
against Obama-Stasi state and Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and
Microsoft
To: DEBATE <debate-list at fahamu.org>

 (Will there be new cloud alternatives to the big capitalist firms so that
there's an easy answer to this? "when your chief information officer
proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your
company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In
the shredder." How come we've not seen any firm not from the US step into
the huge breach so we can all stop being so FB/Google-reliant?)
*
Edward Snowden is not the story*

The fate of the internet is

The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that
the net is finished as a global network and that US firms' cloud services
cannot be trusted.

by John Naughton

The Observer (July 28 2013)

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has
revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems
to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that
escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for
journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious
explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise
stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands
Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is
that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has
achieved thus far {1}.

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had
been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens
across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of
millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to
bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users'
data {2}.

Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US
government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised
business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as
Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to
thousands of people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be - finally - a
serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is
just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the
proper balance between freedom and security lies.

These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order
consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are
concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been
fed a constant stream of journalistic pap - speculation about Snowden's
travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, et
cetera. The "human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is
what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually
works and the direction in which it is heading.

As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as
a result of what we have learned so far.

The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are
numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be
Balkanised, that is, divided into a number of geographical or
jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran
and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their
citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very
contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have
been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the
idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has
become untenable.

Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out {3}, the Obama administration's
"internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as patronising cant. "Today", he
writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy
as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib".

That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have
implications for you and me.

They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted
to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo,
Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US
cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their
"cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from
illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA.
That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT
operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again.

And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a
newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the
European Commission, had to say on the matter recently. "If businesses or
governments think they might be spied on", she said,

    they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud
providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold
your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being
shared against your wishes? Front or back door - it doesn't matter - any
smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act
rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity. {4}

Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon
or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents,
tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder.

Links:

{1}
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/global/the-service-of-snowden.html?_r=0

{2} http://www.theguardian.com/technology/internet

{3}
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueberwachung/information-consumerism-the-price-of-hypocrisy-12292374.html

{4} http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-13-654_en.htm
_____

John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the
Open University.

***

*
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/us/politics/momentum-builds-against-nsa-surveillance.html

*
 *New York Times   July 28, 2013*
  Momentum Builds Against N.S.A. Surveillance By JONATHAN WEISMAN

WASHINGTON — The movement to crack down on government surveillance started
with an odd couple from Michigan, Representatives Justin Amash, a young
libertarian Republican known even to his friends as “chief wing nut,” and
John Conyers Jr., an elder of the liberal left in his 25th House term.

But what began on the political fringes only a week ago has built a
momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable, drawing support from
Republican and Democratic leaders, attracting moderates in both parties and
pulling in some of the most respected voices on national security in the
House.

The rapidly shifting politics were reflected clearly in the House on
Wednesday, when a plan to defund the National Security
Agency<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>’s
telephone data collection program fell just seven votes short of
passage<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/us/politics/house-defeats-effort-to-rein-in-nsa-data-gathering.html>.
Now, after initially signaling that they were comfortable with the scope of
the N.S.A.’s collection of Americans’ phone and Internet activities, but
not their content, revealed last month by Edward J. Snowden, lawmakers are
showing an increasing willingness to use legislation to curb those actions.

Representatives Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, and Zoe
Lofgren, Democrat of California, have begun work on legislation in the
House Judiciary Committee to significantly rein in N.S.A. telephone
surveillance. Mr. Sensenbrenner said on Friday that he would have a bill
ready when Congress returned from its August recess that would restrict
phone surveillance to only those named as targets of a federal terrorism
investigation, make significant changes to the secret
court<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html>that
oversees such programs and give businesses like Microsoft and Google
permission to reveal their dealings before that court.

“There is a growing sense that things have really gone a-kilter here,” Ms.
Lofgren said.

The sudden reconsideration of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism policy has
taken much of Washington by surprise. As the
revelations<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/us/how-edward-j-snowden-orchestrated-a-blockbuster-story.html>by
Mr. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor, were gaining attention in the
news media, the White House and leaders in both parties stood united behind
the programs he had unmasked. They were focused mostly on bringing the
leaker to justice.

Backers of sweeping surveillance powers now say they recognize that changes
are likely, and they are taking steps to make sure they maintain control
over the extent of any revisions. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence
Committee met on Wednesday as the House deliberated to try to find
accommodations to growing public misgivings about the programs, said the
committee’s chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California.

Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat and longtime critic of the N.S.A.
surveillance programs, said he had taken part in serious meetings to
discuss changes.

Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the panel,
said, “We’re talking through it right now.” He added, “There are a lot of
ideas on the table, and it’s pretty obvious that we’ve got some uneasy
folks.”

Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and the chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee, has assured House colleagues that an
intelligence policy bill he plans to draft in mid-September will include
new privacy safeguards.

Aides familiar with his efforts said the House Intelligence Committee was
focusing on more transparency for the secret Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, which oversees data gathering, including possibly
declassifying that court’s orders, and changes to the way the surveillance
data is stored. The legislation may order such data to be held by the
telecommunications companies that produce them or by an independent entity,
not the government.

Lawmakers say their votes to restrain the N.S.A. reflect a gut-level
concern among voters about personal privacy.

“I represent a very reasonable district in suburban Philadelphia, and my
constituents are expressing a growing concern on the sweeping amounts of
data that the government is compiling,” said Representative Michael G.
Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican who represents one of the few true swing
districts left in the House and who voted on Wednesday to limit N.S.A.
surveillance.

Votes from the likes of Mr. Fitzpatrick were not initially anticipated when
Republican leaders chided reporters for their interest in legislation that
they said would go nowhere. As the House slowly worked its way on Wednesday
toward an evening vote to curb government surveillance, even proponents of
the legislation jokingly predicted that only the “wing nuts” — the
libertarians of the right, the most ardent liberals on the left — would
support the measure.

Then Mr. Sensenbrenner, a Republican veteran and one of the primary authors
of the post-Sept. 11 Patriot
Act<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/usa_patriot_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
stepped to a microphone on the House floor. Never, he said, did he intend
to allow the wholesale vacuuming up of domestic phone records, nor did his
legislation envision that data dragnets would go beyond specific targets of
terrorism investigations.

“The time has come to stop it, and the way we stop it is to approve this
amendment,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said.

He had not intended to speak, and when he did, he did not say much, just
seven brief sentences.

“I was able to say what needed to be said in a minute,” he said Friday.

Lawmakers from both parties said the brief speech was a pivotal moment.
When the tally was final, the effort to end the N.S.A.’s programs had
fallen short, 205 to 217 <http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll412.xml>.
Supporters included Republican leaders like Representative Cathy McMorris
Rodgers of Washington and Democratic leaders like Representative James E.
Clyburn of South Carolina. Republican moderates like Mr. Fitzpatrick and
Blue Dog Democrats like Representative Kurt Schrader of Oregon joined with
respected voices on national security matters like Mr. Sensenbrenner and
Ms. Lofgren.

Besides Ms. McMorris Rodgers, Representative Lynn Jenkins of Kansas,
another member of the Republican leadership, voted yes. On the Democratic
side, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Representative Xavier
Becerra of California, and his vice chairman, Representative Joseph Crowley
of New York, broke with the top two Democrats, Representatives Nancy Pelosi
of California and Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, who pressed hard for no
votes.

On Friday, Ms. Pelosi, the House minority leader and a veteran of the
Intelligence Committee, and Mr. Hoyer dashed off a letter to the president
warning that even those Democrats who had stayed with him on the issue on
Wednesday would be seeking changes.

That letter included the signature of Mr. Conyers, who is rallying an
increasingly unified Democratic caucus to his side, as well as 61 House
Democrats who voted no on Wednesday but are now publicly signaling their
discontent.

“Although some of us voted for and others against the amendment, we all
agree that there are lingering questions and concerns about the current”
data collection program, the letter
stated<http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/washington/2013/07/pelosi-153-house-democrats-tell-obama-of-lingering-questions-and-concerns-about-nsa-programs.html>.

Representative Reid Ribble of Wisconsin, a Republican who voted for the
curbs and predicted that changes to the N.S.A. surveillance programs were
now unstoppable, said: “This was in many respects a vote intended to send a
message. The vote was just too strong.”

Ms. Lofgren said the White House and Democratic and Republican leaders had
not come to grips with what she called “a grave sense of betrayal” that
greeted Mr. Snowden’s revelations. Since the Bush administration, lawmakers
had been repeatedly assured that such indiscriminate collection of data did
not exist, and that when targeting was unspecific, it was aimed at people
abroad.

The movement against the N.S.A. began with the fringes of each party. Mr.
Amash of Michigan began pressing for an amendment on the annual military
spending bill aimed at the N.S.A. Leaders of the Intelligence Committee
argued strenuously that such an amendment was not relevant to military
spending and should be ruled out of order.

But Mr. Amash, an acolyte of Ron Paul, a libertarian former congressman,
persisted and rallied support.

Mr. Sensenbrenner and Ms. Lofgren said they were willing to work with the
House and Senate intelligence panels to overhaul the surveillance programs,
but indicated that they did not believe those panels were ready to go far
enough.

“I would just hope the Intelligence Committees will not stick their heads
in the sand on this,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said.

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