Thread: Time Magazine Pushes Draconian Internet Licensing Plan

Time Magazine Pushes Draconian Internet Licensing Plan

Establishment mouthpiece calls for web ID system that would outstrip Communist Chinese style net censorship


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
February 3, 2010



Time Magazine has enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon to back Microsoft executive Craig Mundie’s call for Internet licensing, as authorities push for a system even more stifling than in Communist China, where only people with government permission would be allowed to express free speech.

As we reported earlier this week, during a recent conference at the Davos Economic Forum, Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, told fellow globalists at the summit that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses – in other words government permission to use the web.

His proposal was almost instantly advocated by Time Magazine, who published an article by Barbara Kiviat - one of Mundie’s fellow attendees at the elitist confab. It’s sadistically ironic that Kiviat’s columns run under the moniker “The Curious Capitalist,â€

Driver's licenses for the Internet


by Barbara Kiviat
Time
January 30, 2010



I just went to a panel discussion about Internet security and let me tell you, it was scar-y. Between individual fraud, organized crime, corporate espionage and government spying, it's an incredibly dangerous world out there, which, according to one panelist, is growing exponentially worse.

These are incredibly complex problems that even the smartest of the smart admit they don't have a great handle on, although Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and technology officer, offered up a surprisingly simple solution that might start us down a path to dealing with them: driver's licenses for the Internet.


The thing about the Internet is that it was never intended to be a worldwide system of mass communication. A handful of guys, all of whom knew each other, set up the Web. The anonymity that has come to be a core and cherished characteristic of the Internet didn't exist in the beginning: it was obvious who was who.

As the Internet picked up steam and gathered more users, that stopped being the case, but at no point did anyone change the ways things worked. The Web started out being a no-authentication space and it continues to be that way to this day. Anyone can get online and no one has to say who they are. That's what enables a massive amount of cyber crime: if you're attacked from a computer, you might be able to figure out where that particular machine is located, but there's really no way to go back one step further and track the identity of the computer that hacked into the one that hacked into you.

What Mundie is proposing is to impose authentication. He draws an analogy to automobile use. If you want to drive a car, you have to have a license (not to mention an inspection, insurance, etc). If you do something bad with that car, like break a law, there is the chance that you will lose your license and be prevented from driving in the future. In other words, there is a legal and social process for imposing discipline. Mundie imagines three tiers of Internet ID: one for people, one for machines and one for programs (which often act as proxies for the other two).

Now, there are, of course, a number of obstacles to making such a scheme be reality. Even here in the mountains of Switzerland I can hear the worldwide scream go up: "But we're entitled to anonymity on the Internet!" Really? Are you? Why do you think that?

Mundie pointed out that in the physical world we are implicitly comfortable with the notion that there are certain places we're not allowed to go without identifying ourselves. Are you allowed to walk down the street with no one knowing who you are? Absolutely. Are you allowed to walk into a bank vault and still not give your name? Hardly.

It's easy to envision the same sort of differentiated structure for the Internet, Mundie said. He didn't get into examples, so here's one of mine. If you want to go to Time.com and read all about what's going on in the world, that's fine. No one needs to know who you are. But if you want to set up a site to accept credit-card donations for earthquake victims in Haiti? Well, you're going to have to show your ID for that.

The truth of the matter is, the Internet is still in its Wild West phase. To a large extent, the law hasn't yet shown up. Yet as more and more people move to town, that lawlessness is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. As human societies grow over time they develop more rigid standards for themselves in order to handle their increased size. There is no reason to think the Internet shouldn't follow the same pattern.

Though that's not to say it'll happen anytime soon. Governments certainly have been talking to each other about this (almost by definition, any effective efforts will have to be international in nature), but even in Europe, where there is a cyber security convention in effect, only half of the Continent's nations have signed up.

One stumbling block that was mentioned at today's panel discussion: governments' own intelligence agencies are huge beneficiaries of the Internet's anonymity. We managed to spy on each other before the Web, but how much easier it is now that we can cruise around cyberspace without anyone even knowing we're there.

So don't expect any changes in the short term. But do know that the people in charge—as much as anyone can be in charge when it comes to the Internet—are thinking about it.

http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com ... -internet/

Driver's licenses for the Internet, Part 2


by Barbara Kiviat
Time
February 8, 2010


The conversation about where to draw the line between privacy and security is as old as society itself. I didn't mean to so forcefully insert myself into the middle of that debate when I wrote about a Microsoft executive ruminating on the possibility of driver's licenses for the Internet. Alas, here I am. That original blog post is already one of the 15 most-read of all time on the Curious Capitalist (it warms my heart that the top post remains "What if oil weren't priced in dollars?"), and I am being assailed up and down the Internet for backing what one commentator calls a "web ID system that would outstrip Communist Chinese style net censorship"—at times even being personally threatened.

And yet here I go again. More thoughts on driver's licenses for the Internet.

First, a recap: about a week ago I attended a panel discussion entitled "Securing Cyberspace." Panelists included the CEO of a company that routes about 20% of all Web traffic, the head of the U.N. agency for information technology, a U.S. Senator and member of the Committee on Homeland Security, the CEO of a Swiss company that does security work for digital media, and Microsoft's head of research and strategy. It was the sort of group you'd expect to be sure-footed on a topic like cyber security, and yet the panelists were visibly on edge. Cyber attacks—whether from individual fraudsters, organized cyber gangs, or nation-states undertaking espionage—are getting exponentially worse, they said. Protection, let alone retaliation, is incredibly complicated by the fact that even moderately sophisticated attacks can be difficult to impossible to trace. Yes, computers have IP addresses but crooks don't use their computers, they remotely hijack yours.

Since the baseline anonymity of the Internet provides refuge to so much criminal activity and spying, one way of starting to tackle those problems, suggested Microsoft bigwig Craig Mundie, would be to take away some of that anonymity. Hence driver's licenses for the Internet.

As careful readers can tell you, I did not endorse driver's licenses for the Internet. I think it's a fascinating construct, but the idea as expressed by Mundie and repeated by me is not much more than a sound bite. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to know the details and logistics of an idea before I come out with a strong opinion about it. I've been trying to get back in touch with Mundie to have that conversation—to have it explained to me how, exactly, licensure keeps my home computer and bank account safe from cyber criminals while at the same time preserving my civil liberties (not to mention those of Iranian dissidents). Unfortunately, we haven't been able to catch up with each other and the best I've been able to do is peruse this Microsoft white paper (PDF) about establishing trust on the Internet. It says some comforting things—e.g., "Any regime should not only seek to provide greater authentication to those that want to provide it or consume it, but also provide anonymity for those who wish to engage in anonymous activities"—but leaves me with plenty of questions.

To be clear, I'm not saying that more Internet transparency is necessarily a bad idea either. One of the most jarring moments at that panel came amid a discussion about the possibility of international cooperation in going after cyber threats. Some U.S. officials in the room pointed out that a large stumbling block to any such effort would be the U.S.'s own intelligence agencies, which have a vested interest in the Internet's anonymity. As my colleague Mark Thompson recently wrote:

What U.S. officials don't like to acknowledge is that the Pentagon is hard at work developing an offensive cyber capability of its own... The Air Force wants the ability to burrow into any computer system anywhere in the world "completely undetected." It wants to slip computer code into a potential foe's computer and let it sit there for years, "maintaining a 'low and slow' gathering paradigm" to thwart detection.

Internet anonymity helps enable free speech, that is true. But it also helps enable plenty of other things, like espionage and crime. We've long talked about how mass anonymity online breeds a lack of civility. The tech-review site Engadget recently had to turn off its comments because the tone had grown so "mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening." Cyber bullying is another example of what anonymity inculcates. Here is a story about some kids who have killed themselves as a result.

My point is simply this: the issue of anonymity on the Internet has many dimensions. That's why I was floored by the almost entirely one-note, vitriolic response to my original post. Yes, a few voices presented other opinions. One commenter said that more accountability would help keep our children safer. Another pointed out the benefits to honest commerce.

But overall the reaction was much closer to emotional than to reasoned, perhaps an example of what Net pioneer-turned-worry-wart Jaron Lanier calls hive thinking. Contemplating the extent to which the Internet should remain anonymous is, to me, a fascinating endeavor. But maybe the anonymous Internet isn't the place to do it.

http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com ... et-part-2/

Microsoft's Craig Mundie Wants Driver's Licenses for the Internet

The company wants to be able to tell whether it’s a human or a dog using the Internet


By Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor
Softpedia
February 8th, 2010


Microsoft wants to be able to tell whether it’s a human or a dog using the Internet. And the solution is rather simple according to Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. The man that replaced Bill Gates at Microsoft along with Ray Ozzie (now chief software architect) proposed that users have the equivalent of driver’s license for the Internet at a panel discussion about Internet security (via CuriousCapitalist). What Mundie is proposing is that users need to authenticate themselves while online.

Such a proposition, and especially coming from one of the Redmond company’s top executives will undoubtedly face a barrage of criticism from the Internet freedom and anonymity front. Mundie envisions a world in which just as in the case of driving a car, people would need a driver’s license to get on the Internet. But not necessarily a proof of their abilities to navigate the web, but rather as a means to authenticate the person sitting behind the computer. Such an initiative is obviously designed to curb cybercrime.

There’s an extremely famous cartoon authored by Peter Steiner and published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993, in which two dogs are sitting in front of a computer, and one tells the other: “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.â€