Posted on 02/18/2009 11:38:15 AM PST by EagleUSA
China and the United States approach politics differently, but their teenagers share a favorite means of communication — text messaging. What these teens say to each other may matter only to them. But that they are able to communicate this easily, openly and even cheaply matters to us all.
Without the freedom to have these little conversations, a nation is not equipped to have the bigger ones. It is with the vigilance of a teen facing time without texting that we should take a day to focus not on the small phone screen or the bigger laptop screen, but the broader picture — the tremendous value of an open Internet.
OneWeb Day, Sept. 22, is the third anniversary of the “Earth Day” for Internet users. It’s a day to consider what business models, technical tools and governmental policies help the Internet — and what threats are lurking.
Three threats to Internet freedom are worth noting on OneWeb Day. The first is the temptation to filter Internet content for what most agree are good causes — curbing terrorism, child pornography, gambling, and copyright piracy. However, the Internet could die a death by a thousand cuts if Internet service providers (ISPs) must turn over customer records or cut their access whenever a government has a good reason.
That leads to the second threat — government spying. George Orwell’s vision of an all-seeing, government-controlled “telescreen” in every home and office is no longer fiction.
The size and scope of the U.S. government’s surveillance of electronic communications is largely unknown. Congress effectively granted a cloak of secrecy when it renewed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act with retroactive immunity for telecom carriers who turned over customer records. The move essentially blocks 40 lawsuits that would have shed light on this allegedly illegal activity.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Al Gore wanted all of our encryption keys so Bill’s government could spy on us any time it wanted to even if we used encryption. I’m glad he didn’t succeed.
They can brute force your keys with an insanely powerful computer.
Easier to beat it out of you or ruin your life until you give it up. There isn't enough computing power in the world to crack a well-encrypted file within decades. Rumors of NSA ultra computers run up against the plain reality of how hard it is to factor large numbers.
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