Edward Snowden Tell the IETF How To Protect Us From Govt Spies

Former CIA employee, NSA contractor, and all-around hero Edward Snowden knows a thing or two about how the US government’s spying grid works. He recently spoke via a webcast at the IETF meeting about making the internet more focused on privacy and user welfare- a speech that was well worth a listen, considering his credentials.

The IETF is the most prominent body that creates open standards of management, design and use of the internet, and Snowden asked them three questions: Who is the Internet for, who does it serve, who is the IETF’s ultimate customer?

His point was that the internet was created with the end-user (us) in mind, not the government. It was thus the responsibility of the IETF to secure the internet for the interest of the end-users, ensuring that no loop-holes could be easily exploited by state actors and malicious individuals alike.

Although the meeting was not recorded, pictures and quotes were tweeted by attendees who also got to see a screening of Citizenfour, a movie that follows Snowden’s trials and tribulations when he decided to leak NSA documents to the people.

A frank live chat with Snowden…something that can happen just at an @ietf meeting! Internet democracy on stage. pic.twitter.com/nbAqP6nmRi

— Simon Pietro Romano (@spromano) July 19, 2015

Snowden noted that the current “safety protocols” were far from sufficient, as government spy agencies were able to easily access much of the user’s data; in particular, credit cards were of concern due to the increasing use of that form of user information in online purchases.

“We need to divorce identity from persona in a lasting way. People are being killed based on metadata.”

A new protocol was necessary, and he requested that the engineers implement SPUD, a protocol that would reduce the number of gateways that data had to pass through by combining transport protocols. However, he also noted that SPUD itself could be compromised and the core UDP protocol could become a new channel for metadata to leak through.

Hardware addreesses were another bone of contention, in that they were easily identified and “long lasting”; these would pose a threat to privacy. Connecting to a Wi-Fi network causes a connection to be made to your MAC address, risking one’s identity.

He said, “we need not only to think what the problems are today, but how we preserve the internet for the future. Everybody should be safe all the time, else we let others choose who will be safe or not.”

At the end of his discourse, Snowden received a standing ovation.

Source: FossBytes

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