Perhaps you’ve met one like him.
He asked me to come over to his apartment and look at his computer, saying only that it had a problem. Some charitable agency had given him a decent system with Ubuntu installed. He had no particular trouble using it, but complained that the Internet was not working. “It won’t let me on the Internet,” he whined.
As the machine was sitting on a table away from the wall, I glanced around at the back of the machine. No ethernet cable, no phone line, no wireless antennas or dongle. I told him he wasn’t connected to the Internet. It took him quite a while to process that idea, since his only previous computer experience was at the library or on someone’s cellphone. In his mind, having the device was all one needed. When he found out what it cost to get Internet service, he gave the system back to the agency.
To this day, I am pretty sure he does not comprehend the nature of networking and all the cables running around the world. He knew the names of some telephone companies, but never knew that many of them were major carriers of Internet traffic. Like most people, he knew even less about the biggest carriers of all whose names seldom enter the public awareness, like Level 3, known as a “backbone carrier.”
I shake my head at some of the comments about the NSA snooping, not to mention other agencies. Most people have no idea what’s involved, and demand solutions that simply could never be. It’s bad enough they still believe our government works as advertised. There are any number of models promoted in both the mainstream and alternate media outlets, all carefully designed to deceive. Most people fail to understand the massive hidden system of control, a totally separate culture rather like an occupying foreign army, sitting among us here in the US. I should know; I was once a cog within that system.
Short of outright slaughtering a significant portion of that ruling class, we who are being ruled cannot change what is happening. If we did kill a bunch of them, most of the system on which we rely would fall apart. Even at the local level, you have a double-barreled shotgun pointed at you: (1) many local authorities are part of that same basic system as feudal servants of the higher, and (2) even without that problem, they are seldom ready to take up the reins of the system.
Something has to give. Eventually, it will.
Currently, the Internet depends almost entirely on various kinds of transmission cables. These cables run all over the place, on poles and other fixtures, under the ground and under the sea. Service companies are constantly laying new ones every day because there’s money in it. Offering service to new areas, or better service to old ones, allows certain companies who control the cables to make more profit. Getting authority and access is simply not an issue in most jurisdictions. File the permits and those who own the land are not permitted much in the way of resistance. You can call it what you like, but governments and businesses like doing things on the Internet because it lowers their costs, and shifts a lot of cost back onto the customer. Already, a great many essential services almost require using the Internet. Day by day, it becomes more essential in that, because it is possible for just about anyone to access the Internet, it becomes necessary that they do so. Internet access is among the minimum standard services like any other utility service. The transmission cables are taken for granted in all but a few corners of the world.
Current technology requires that at some point all Net traffic crosses a limited few traffic hubs. Your packets will inevitably hit one of a handful of central networks used to keep it all sane for us. So the alphabet agencies need only present an order for those companies controlling this hardware to permit a tap. The government agency will generally bring their own equipment to do whatever it is they do with all the traffic. Most of the time they gather a copy of everything, reading it passively. Sometimes it seems utterly certain they may also get directly involved in how that traffic is passed, in a broad collection of things we call “man in the middle” (MITM) attacks. We already know the NSA also uses software backdoors and plants snooping malware on systems all over the Internet when they can’t simply hook up a device at some traffic hubs outside the US.
Currently, the counter to all this is various forms of encryption. When it became clear the NSA had subverted at least one major encryption standard, the independent experts jumped right into creating new standards with an eye to avoiding infiltration from the government spies. There appears to be some effort to root out the government moles from the development process, though you won’t read much about that.
Absolutes are simply not possible in this game, not on this plane of existence. The NSA struggles to gain and maintain absolute surveillance, and we struggle to gain and maintain absolute privacy, but what is actually possible is somewhat less than absolute. There are some variables that slide, and the range is pretty wide for some issues. New encryption standards can reduce the effectiveness of MITM snooping because you can’t touch it without changing something that would be noticed. There is a broad community standard of Open Source cooperation between experts that has proved to offer rather low risk of infiltration, since too many people can and do audit the code. Reducing the profit motive improves security for the end user. One of the most obsessively open and non-profit computer software operations is Debian Linux, and I use it where paranoia is healthy. I recommend it, but it’s not for everyone. Still, it represents the best solution for Internet use as it now exists by virtue of reducing the risks.
The technology never stands still. At some point the cables will become obsolete, both in terms of usefulness and as a method itself. Those who are on the cutting edge of development are already pushing into areas of networking that doesn’t require any underlying infrastructure. This will require spying agencies to shift gears, and they are altogether likely to be caught running behind for quite some time. By that time, perhaps other shifts in other spheres of life will have forced a totally new government system, but we won’t go long without another bunch of folks forming yet another community within government to grab all the control possible. The folks who work for NSA, CIA and such are not like you and me. They are real people, but when it comes to their work, they are an alien life force.
But so are the folks who create all this technology stuff. So are you and I for simply being aware of it all. My friend mentioned above who wanted help getting on the Internet represents the mainstream.
