Thank Snowden: Internet Industry Now Considers The Intelligence Community An Adversary, Not A Partner by Mike Masnick
From the post:
We already wrote about the information sharing efforts coming out of the White House cybersecurity summit at Stanford today. That’s supposedly the focus of the event. However, there’s a much bigger issue happening as well: and it’s the growing distrust between the tech industry and the intelligence community. As Bloomberg notes, the CEOs of Google, Yahoo and Facebook were all invited to join President Obama at the summit and all three declined. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook will be there, but he appears to be delivering a message to the intelligence and law enforcement communities, if they think they’re going to get him to drop the plan to encrypt iOS devices by default:
In an interview last month, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said the N.S.A. “would have to cart us out in a box” before the company would provide the government a back door to its products. Apple recently began encrypting phones and tablets using a scheme that would force the government to go directly to the user for their information. And intelligence agencies are bracing for another wave of encryption.
Disclosure: I have been guilty of what I am about to criticize Mike Masnick about and will almost certainly be guilty of it in the future. That, however, does not make it right.
What would you say is being assumed in the Mike’s title?
Guesses anyone?
What if it read: U.S. Internet Industry Now Considers The U.S. Intelligence Community An Adversary, Not A Partner?
Does that help?
The trivial point is that the “Internet Industry” isn’t limited to the U.S. and Mike’s readership isn’t either.
More disturbing though is that the “U.S. (meant here descriptively) Internet Industry” at one point did consider the “U.S. (again descriptively) Intelligence Community” as a partner at one point.
That being the case and seeing how Mike duplicates that assumption in his title, how should countries besides the U.S. view the reliability (in terms of government access) of U.S. produced software?
That’s a simple enough question.
What is your answer?
The assumption of partnership between the “U.S. Internet Industry” and the “U.S. Intelligence Community” would have me running to back an alternative to China’s recent proposal for source code being delivered to the government (in that case China).
Rather than every country having different import requirements for software sales, why not require the public posting of commercial software source for software sales anywhere?
Posting of source code doesn’t lessen your rights to the code (see copyright statutes) and it makes detection of software piracy trivially easy since all commercial software has to post its source code.
Oh, some teenager might compile a copy but do you really think major corporations in any country are going to take that sort of risk? It just makes no sense.
As far as the “U.S. Intelligence Community” concerns, remember “The treacherous are ever distrustful…” The ill-intent of the world they see is a reflection of their own malice towards others. Or after years of systematic abuse, the smoldering anger of the abused.