Time for Internet Engineers to Fight Back Against the “Surveillance Internet”

Will the usually obscure Internet Engineering Task Force -- that open-to-anyone group of engineers who design and keep the Internet functioning -- step up and fight back against mass surveillance?

That possibility is now in the air, following a talk in Vancouver by cryptographer Bruce Schneier. He laid partial responsibility of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance on the IETF’s doorstep. “Fundamentally, surveillance is a business model of the Internet. The NSA didn’t wake up and say: ‘Let’s just spy on everybody, it said: ‘Wow, corporations are spying on everybody, let’s get ourselves a copy,’ ” he said, referring to the cloud computing providers and others who warehouse data. The NSA found the Internet quite easy to tap in various places; as a result, “The NSA has turned the Internet into a giant surveillance platform” that is robust both politically, legally, and technologically, he added. Those were fighting words to IETF members.