Mois : novembre 2013 (Page 2 of 12)

Dismantling the surveillance state won’t be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we’re going to be breaking new ground. Again, the politics of this is a bigger task than the engineering, but the engineering is critical. We need to demand that real technologists be involved in any key government decision making on these issues. We’ve had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy. To the engineers, I say this: we built the internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it.

The Internet companies’ data centers are locked down with full-time security and state-of-the-art surveillance, including heat sensors and iris scanners. But between the data centers — on Level 3’s fiber-optic cables that connected those massive computer farms — information was unencrypted and an easier target for government intercept efforts, according to three people with knowledge of Google’s and Yahoo’s systems who spoke on the condition of anonymity. It is impossible to say for certain how the N.S.A. managed to get Google and Yahoo’s data without the companies’ knowledge. But both companies, in response to concerns over those vulnerabilities, recently said they were now encrypting data that runs on the cables between their data centers. Microsoft is considering a similar move.

The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document.

Le droit à la vie privée à l’ère du numérique a fait l’objet d’un nouveau projet de résolution adopté aujourd’hui, par consensus, par la Troisième Commission. L’Assemblée générale affirmerait ainsi, pour la première fois, que « les droits dont les personnes jouissent hors ligne doivent également être protégés en ligne, y compris le droit à la vie privée ».

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has called on Barack Obama to rein in the National Security Agency as he described the whistleblower Edward Snowden as “a hero” whom history will judge “very favourably”.

Les premiers à prendre conscience du problème, bien avant les révélations d’Edward Snowden, étaient les Pays-Bas, qui ont imposé un cloud national à leurs administrations dès 2011. En France, la question du cloud souverain a également été posée à la même époque, ce qui a donné naissance à deux consortiums, Cloudwatt (Orange/Thales), et Numergy (SFR/Bull).

En octobre, la presse californienne avait raconté comment le jeune milliardaire avait racheté trois villas contiguës à la sienne, à Palo Alto, histoire de ne pas être embêté par des voisins. Celui qui fait commerce de la vie privée des autres protège donc la sienne. On peut se demander si la tentative de rachat de Snapchat par Facebook ne relève pas du même réflexe.

The next social network will provide tools with which it will be possible to create endless variations – variations the original creators of the network could have never dreamt of. That’s where the magic is going to happen; where the masses will create perpetual diversity and disruption, effectively avoiding Facebook’s fate. After all, how can you disrupt a network that is disrupting itself?