Straight talk about Internet privacy and security

[Commentary] The Internet is inherently insecure by design. Privacy is an illusion on the Internet.

President Barack Obama's basic mistake was to give Internet users a false sense of security. Instead of passively relying on laws and regulations to keep sensitive personal information safe, we’d do a lot better to cultivate a healthy and realistic sense of the dangers posed by leaving credit card numbers and other personal data on web sites protected by nothing more than a static password that’s easy to remember. If the government wants to take steps to help safeguard our data online, the most sensible plan is to work with the private sector on a rating system like the one the MPAA has for movies. This is necessary for banks, but not for most sites. At the other extreme, sites that don’t store any user data beyond passwords shouldn’t need to be involved in reporting hacks.

[Richard Bennett has is a coinventor of Wi-Fi and the modern Ethernet architecture]