Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is
If anything, I think this should be a wakeup call for those of us who have the capability to change things. I'm not talking about lobbying or raising attention to the issue, but the technical challenges of designing a network that is immune to all forms of surveillance. Let's treat this as an issue of computer science, not politics.Now I'm not claiming that this will be easy (and it may not even be possible), but this whole episode has made me seriously reconsider my long-term career direction in terms of the type of research I want to be doing. Pioneers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn created the "Internet 1" so to speak, and everything since then has been building on that. There's been plenty of projects that have worked towards getting around these surveillance measures (Tor for example), and I think we need more things like this.We need to fundamentally rethink the design of the Internet, because the current design is broken. Just like TCP/IP provides the infrastructure to abstract over different networking technologies and physical links (and the failure/slowness of individual links), we need something that abstracts over the basic, unencrypted (or encrypted but subject to centralised sabotage, like SSL) communication layer. Something that third parties can't intercept, at least not with anything like the ease with which they do today. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, that email is still unencrypted by default, and we don't have public-key cryptography built in to every mail client and turned on by default.Most importantly, we need more distribution, and to stop relying on centralised service providers, who are necessarily subject to the laws of the country in which they operate (see: recent articles discussing impacts of the issue on US cloud firms operating in foreign markets). Facebook should be a protocol, not a service. Twitter should be a protocol, not a service. And so forth. This of course completely upends the business model these technologies are based on, and would need to be approached by people with a completely different perspective.I certainly don't have the answers to these questions. But it's made me curious and it's something I'll be giving a great deal of thought to in the coming years.As Albert Einstein once said: "We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them".