[liberationtech] Pew Internet survey on the future of the internet

[lrai...@pewinternet.org]

You might have missed an email invitation earlier this week, so I'm hoping you 
won't consider this second invitation spam.
You are invited to participate in an online survey being conducted by Pew 
Research Center's Internet Project and Elon 
University's Imagining the Internet 
Center to assess the likely 
future impacts of the Internet. This Pew-Elon survey asks important 
stakeholders like you to reflect upon the most likely evolution of technology 
and people's uses of it by the year 2025 and the potential impacts this will 
have on society.  We hope you'll take 20-25 minutes to share your thoughts in 
this new canvassing of experts.
To participate in the survey, click on the survey link below and enter the 
username and password provided.  Please note that the survey is easiest to 
navigate on a laptop, desktop or tablet computer rather than on a mobile phone.
https://www.rationalsurvey.com/s/10384
Username: FINL4BG
Password: FINL4BG
By default, all of your responses to this survey are confidential.  However, we 
provide respondents the opportunity to take credit for their remarks by simply 
typing their name at the beginning of each response.  We strongly encourage you 
to take advantage of this feature as it lends credibility to the results and 
contributes to a more vibrant public conversation. Again, to have your remarks 
attributed to you, please type your name at the beginning of each open-ended 
response you provide.  If your name does not appear at the beginning of a 
response, it will remain anonymous.
If you know other thought leaders who would contribute meaningful insights on 
the questions posed in this survey, please send us their contact details so we 
can invite them to participate.

The Pew Internet Project and Elon University will issue a series of reports 
based on this survey in 2014. Your answers, attributed or anonymous, will also 
be added to Imagining the 
Internet. If you have any 
questions, please contact one of us.

Thank you!
Lee Rainie, lrai...@pewinternet.org
Director, Pew Research Center's Internet Project
Janna Anderson, ande...@elon.edu
Director, Imagining the Internet Center, Elon University
Kristen Purcell, kpurc...@pewinternet.org
Associate Director for Research, Pew Research Center's Internet Project
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[liberationtech] Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/521856/group-thinks-anonymity-should-be-baked-into-the-internet-itself/

Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself

Following NSA surveillance revelations, talks advance on making the
privacy-protecting tool Tor an Internet standard.

By David Talbot on November 26, 2013

WHY IT MATTERS

Published reports suggest that Internet traffic is widely spied upon by the
NSA and other government agencies.

The Internet’s main engineers have asked the architects of Tor—networking
software designed to make Web browsing private—to consider turning the
technology into an Internet standard.

If widely adopted, such a standard would make it easy to include the
technology in consumer and business products ranging from routers to apps.
This would, in turn, allow far more people to browse the Web without being
identified by anyone who might be spying on Internet traffic.

If the discussions bear fruit, it could lead to the second major initiative
of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in response to the mass
surveillance by the National Security Administration. Already the IETF is
working to encrypt more of the data that flows between your computer and the
websites you visit (see “Engineers Plan a Fully Encrypted Internet”).

Collaborating with Tor would add an additional layer of security and privacy.
When Tor is successfully used, the websites you visit don’t know the true
address and location of your computer, and anyone watching traffic from your
computer wouldn’t know where you’re browsing—a distinct layer of protection
that goes beyond encrypting your communications.

Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity College, Dublin, believes
that forging Tor into a standard that interoperates with other parts of the
Internet could be better than leaving Tor as a separate tool that requires
people to take special action to implement. “I think there are benefits that
might flow in both directions,” he says. “I think other IETF participants
could learn useful things about protocol design from the Tor people, who’ve
faced interesting challenges that aren’t often seen in practice. And the Tor
people might well get interest and involvement from IETF folks who’ve got a
lot of experience with large-scale systems.”

Andrew Lewman, executive director of Tor, says the group is considering it.
“We’re basically at the stage of ‘Do we even want to go on a date together?’
It’s not clear we are going to do it, but it’s worth exploring to see what is
involved. It adds legitimacy, it adds validation of all the research we’ve
done,” he says. On the other hand, he adds: “The risks and concerns are that
it would tie down developers in rehashing everything we’ve done, explaining
why we made decisions we made. It also opens it up to being weakened,” he
says, because third-party companies implementing Tor could add their own
changes.

The IETF is an informal organization of engineers that changes Internet code
and operates by rough consensus. Internet service providers, companies, and
websites aren’t required to implement any standards the IETF issues. And even
if security standards are implemented, they may not be widely deployed. For
example, years ago the IETF created a standard for encrypting Web traffic
between your computer and the websites you visit. Although this standard,
HTTPS, is built into most software for serving Web pages and browsing the
Web, only banks, e-commerce sites, and a number of big websites like Google
and Facebook have elected to actually use it. The IETF hopes to make such
encryption the default for a future Web communications standard known as HTTP
2.0.

The Tor Project is a nonprofit group that receives government and private
funding to produce its software, which is used by law enforcement agencies,
journalists, and criminals alike. The technology originally grew out of work
by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory aimed at protecting military users (see
“Dissent Made Safer”).

When someone installs Tor on his computer and takes other precautions, it
supplies that computer with a directory of relays, or network points, whose
owners have volunteered to handle Tor traffic. Tor then ensures that the
user’s traffic takes extra steps through the Internet. At each stop, the
previous computer address and routing information get freshly encrypted,
meaning the final destination sees only the address of the most recent relay,
and none of the previous ones.

Leaks by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, suggest that circumventing
Tor was one of the NSA’s goals, and that the agency had had some success (see
“Anonymity Network Tor Needs a Tune-up to Protect Users from Surveillance”).
“We are about 10 people, and have multibillion dollar agencies trying to
break our technology,” Lewman says.
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Re: [liberationtech] Fighting Surveillance by Improving OpenSource Surveillance

[Nick]

Hi Fabio,

Quoth Fabio Pietrosanti (naif):
> A frequent thinking is, how can we "troll" the surveillance industry
> with unconventional methods?
> 
> A very nice, yet controversial, way could be to improve Opensource
> Surveillance Technologies.

OK, at best this would succeed in shrinking the surveillance 
industry, due to being primarily for support and training, rather 
than licensing. But what you're really enabling is easier and more 
effective surveillance, so overall I can't imagine a scenario based 
on this tactic where the amount of surveillance and censorship was 
reduced.

Your email reads like a troll of the list, frankly, but regardless,
the topic is related something I have worried about myself; I work 
on free OCR software that I know is being used in surveillance 
programmes.  It isn't something I am happy about, but I decided that 
I should continue to work on the software, as it's useful and 
important outside of the world of surveillance too.

Nick
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Re: [liberationtech] Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself

[Pranesh Prakash]

Eugen Leitl [2013-11-29 11:47]:
> The IETF hopes to make such
> encryption the default for a future Web communications standard known as HTTP
> 2.0.

This is shoddy reporting, imho.  There is no IETF consensus on this yet,
as one would know by following the ietf and ietf-http-wg lists.  Many on
those threads have argued vehemently that encryption should be made more
convenient and attractive, and even recommended (SHOULD), but not be
made mandatory (MUST).

Relevant threads:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2013OctDec/0625.html
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg84174.html

Regards,
Pranesh

-- 
Pranesh Prakash
Policy Director
Centre for Internet and Society
T: +91 80 40926283 | W: http://cis-india.org
PGP ID: 0x1D5C5F07 | Twitter: @pranesh_prakash

Access to Knowledge Fellow
Information Society Project, Yale Law School
T: +1 520 314 7147 | W: http://yaleisp.org

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[liberationtech] Syria: social media & mobile technology landscape

[Yosem Companys]

From: Anahi Ayala Iacucci 

I am putting together a brief doc on the social media and mobile
technology situation in Syria, looking specifically at:

1) use of social media inside the country and outside the country by
the diaspora community and the refugee community
2) security/cyber security risks and case studies related to the use
of social media/internet
3) mobile technology landscape: use of SMS and mobile technology by
the local population inside the country and by the refugee population
4) existing mobile services/mobile apps for the provision of
information to the local population
5) regulations related to the use of bulk/blast SMS within Syria at the moment

If anyone here has some information, suggestions, resources, case
studies or examples, feel free to send it my way or contact me
directly for a chat (time sensitive, as I will need to have at least a
preliminary list by Monday!).

Thanks,
Anahi

Anahi Ayala Iacucci | Senior Innovation Advisor
aay...@internews.org | Mobile 1 (+1) 202-330-2301
Mobile 2 (+39) 345-805-3067 | Skype anahiii | Twitter @anahi_ayala
Address 1640 Rhode Island Ave. NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036, USA

www.innovation.internews.org | @info_innovation |
facebook.com/internews.innovation
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