F-Secure's Hypponen: The Internet Is a 'US Colony' 263
nk497 writes "Web users are vulnerable to mass online spying because the U.S. has too much power online, according to a leading security researcher. Discussing revelations of U.S. spying at his LinuxCon keynote speech, F-Secure's chief research officer Mikko Hypponen argued that the internet had 'become a U.S. colony,' at the expense of democracy. 'We're back in the age of colonization,' he said. 'We should think about the Americans as our masters.' Hypponen argued that its dominance over the web gave the U.S. too much power over foreign countries, noting that while the majority of European politicians likely use U.S. services every day, most U.S. politicians and business leaders don't, for example, use Swedish-based cloud services. 'It's an imbalanced situation,' he said. 'All the major services are based in the U.S.'"
Re:if it wasn't americans, it would be someone els (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, I'd prefer American's do the spying instead of Russians or god forbid Mujaheddin army from the garden variety of middle eastern kingdoms/banana republics. I am not a born American by the way, if you are going to try flaming me with phrases starting with "You, Americans always say it like that....blah-blah". It is common sense. Regardless how bad the freedoms are in this country, I'd rather not be anywhere else at this moment in time.
Re:Lesser of Evils? (Score:4, Interesting)
Saying this as a European, the European one would eradicate all anonymity in the name of getting rid of every last trace of "hate speech", "antifeminism" etc.
Re:if it wasn't americans, it would be someone els (Score:3, Interesting)
They are, it's just that individual states of Europe has a intelligence budget so low, they couldn't even spy on their own citizens let alone foreigners abroad.
Why should I, as a citizen of Europe, have less rights online than US citizens? Especially when we are talking about companies (Google, Microsoft, etc.) that operates within EU, whom are also forced by US law to give away stuff to US government.
Europe should create laws where service providers (working directly or indirectly in Europe) can't give the user's data to third parties without (very least) informing the user in question. Purpose of these laws should be aimed at conflicting with US's FISA request-law which prevents me from knowing if my data is given away or not.
Re:stfu. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's quite a reasonable comment, actually. (Somebody mod the AC up?)
Most consumer-level internet resources are in the US because the datacenters are. The datacenters are mostly in the US because it's still a nice place to start a company, and most of the companies have their HQ here. I'm not sure whether the key is where the corporate HQ is located, or where the datacenter is located, but I'm thinking either makes you vulnerable. Many countries' governments are seeing a problem with this.
That being the case, it presents a real risk for fragmentation of the internet. Countries won't want their people all going to a foreign company and datacenter just to escape spying (better to be spied on by a foreign power that doesn't share with your government), and breaking the internet along government boundaries would be tragic.
Maybe a better answer is to just fix the US. What if we just defunded the NSA, fired everyone, scrapped all the datacenters, demolished the buildings, and salted the earth? OK, we'd be at somewhat higher risk of terrorism because of the loss of SIGINT, and we wouldn't want to lose that forever, plus we'd need SIGINT again before some major power goes to war again (sure to happen inevitably), but I think the cost might be worth the value of the object lesson about government overreach.
gee, then don't be all socialist! (Score:4, Interesting)
1) There is a reason why tech VC is concentrated in the US - our laws don't punish the greedy 0.1% who put cash in high-risk startups. The rest of the Western world is way behind us due to tons of crazy legal restrictions on VC.
2) Companies like Google may be founded and headquartered in the US, but they are really global companies with workers, offices, servers, and taxable incomes everywhere around the world.