Creation of The Internet … Widely Regarded as a Bad Move?

Creation of The Internet … Widely Regarded as a Bad Move?

When an article requotes Douglas Adam’s with:

In the ’90s the Internet was created … This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

You get ready to read on [here]:

This relates to an extended blog post by Riana Pfefferkorn and which tries to make sense of the increasing requirement for encryption, and the tension that this causes law enforcement agencies, and with the draft EARN (Eliminating Abusive and Rampany Neglect of Interactive Technologies) Act of 2019 [here]:

Basically we have now reach a point where the rights of citizens to privacy is pitched against the rights of society to protect itself. With the every increasing problem of cybercrime, we must now fix the broken Internet we have created and build it properly, and with security at its core. This is done with data encryption, but this is increasingly closing the door on the ability to investigate data on devices. And so we see Police Scotland setting up places which break the security of devices, and which reveal virtually every aspect of someone’s lives.

Riana outlines that the development of the Internet saw great opportunties for Internet service providers and that Section 230 passed in the 1990s provided a way for them to develop without being held responsible for what was said or done on their platform. In this way Twitter could host a site where its users could abuse each other, without being held responsible. It provided immunity for these companies. Along with this the CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement) Act supported the opportunity for wiretapping within communication providers. But this wiretapping has little effect, as most of the communications involves encryption tunnels, and where there is no requirement for Web hosting companies to store the encryption keys involved. With the increasing using of end-to-end encryption, the only entities with the keys are the two end points.

Riana then defines that we are now in a phase of “techlash”, and where we are raining against the overpowering control of the Internet in our lives, and in the growth of surveillance capitalism. For many, she argues, that the immunity of the tech companies is now at threat and that the providers of these Internet services could now be held accountable for the bad things that they platform hosts. For every billion posts of family pictures on Facebook, there is a gunman who films himself live.

She outlines that humans are sometimes not nice people, and that this is not new in our world. But their actions are made a whole lot worse in the Internet-enabled world. She even outlines that:

“Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people.”

So, go on, get involved in this debate, as it is the greatest debate of the 21st Century. Please go and give it a read: