Security boss calls for end to net anonymity. Kaspersky's online police state

[Magda Hassan]

Security boss calls for end to net anonymity


By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Posted in Security, 16th October 2009 20:06 GMT
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The CEO of Russia's No. 1 anti-virus package has said that the internet's biggest security vulnerability is anonymity, calling for mandatory internet passports that would work much like driver licenses do in the offline world.
The comments by Eugene Kaspersky, who is also the founder of Kaspersky Lab, came during an interview this week with Vivian Yeo of ZDNet Asia. In it, he proposed the formation of an internet police body that would require users everywhere to be uniquely identified.


"Everyone should and must have an identification, or internet passport," he was quoted as saying. "The internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrong...to introduce it in the same way."

Kaspersky, whose comments are raising the eyebrows of some civil liberties advocates, went on to say such a system shouldn't be voluntary.
"I'd like to change the design of the internet by introducing regulation - internet passports, internet police and international agreement - about following internet standards," he continued. "And if some countries don't agree with or don't pay attention to the agreement, just cut them off."
He rejected the notion that internet protocol numbers were sufficient for tracking a user, arguing they are too easy to come by.
"You're not sure who exactly has the connection," he explained. "Even if the IP address is traced to an internet cafe, they will not know who the customer or person is behind the attacks. Think about cars - you have plates on cars, but you also have driver licenses."
Kaspersky was traveling on Friday and not available to be interviewed for this article. A company spokeswoman declined to comment.
Kaspersky admitted such a system would be hard to put in place because of the cost and difficulty of reaching international agreements. But remarkably, his interview transcript spends no time contemplating the inevitable downsides that would come in a world where internet anonymity is a thing of the past.
"You could make the same argument about the offline world," said Matt Zimmerman, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "You know, every purchase you make should be tracked, we should ban the use of cash, we should put cameras up everywhere because in that massive data collection something might be collected to help someone. But we think privacy is an important enough countervailing value that we should prevent that."
In Kaspersky's world, services such as Psiphon and The Onion Router (Tor) - which are legitimately used by Chinese dissidents and Google users alike to shield personally identifiable information - would no longer be legal. Or at least they'd have to be redesigned from the ground up to give police the ability to surveil them. That's not the kind of world many law-abiding citizens would feel comfortable inhabiting.
And aside from the disturbing big-brother scenario, there are the problematic logistics of requiring every internet user anywhere in the world to connect using an internationally approved device that authenticates his unique identity. There's no telling how many innovations might be squashed under a system like that.
No doubt, the cybercriminals that Kaspersky has valiantly fought for more than a decade are only getting better at finding ways to exploit weaknesses in internet technologies increasingly at the heart of the way we shop, socialize and work. But to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who sacrifice net liberty for incremental increases in security no doubt will get neither. ®
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/16/...anonymity/

[Magda Hassan]

The Rising Tide of Internet Censorhsip

Will recent successes in fighting internet controls be enough to stave off tyranny?

James Corbett
The Corbett Report 5 February, 2010


The focus is back on Internet censorship this week as a pair of articles from Time Magazine and The New York Times came out almost simultaneously advocating for licences to operate web sites. These articles were skillfully skewered by Paul Joseph Watson as lame attempts to shore up a disintegrating establishment media in the face of a blogosphere that is increasingly replacing them.
The articles follow on calls by Craig Mundie—Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer—for an Internet licencing system. Introducing the idea, he said "We need a kind of World Health Organization for the Internet." Evidently unaware of the ongoing investigation into the WHO's role in manufacturing the H1N1 pandemic hoax to line the pockets of Big Pharma, Mundie added that an international Internet authority should be given the same kind of authority that the WHO has in dealing with a pandemic. "When there is a pandemic, it organizes the quarantine of cases. We are not allowed to organize the systematic quarantine of machines that are compromised." These calls are worrying because they represent only the latest instance of influential figures proposing increasingly tyrannical controls on free speech on the Internet.
The Obama presidency has seen an increase in hype over cybersecurity threats, with the influential CSIS "think tank" having written white papers proposing cybersecurity as a key issue for the 44th president. As we reported last July, CSIS argued for "minimium standards for securing cyberspace" because "voluntary action is not enough."
Shortly after Obama took office last year, Senator Jay Rockefeller introduced a Senate bill (S.773) that would give the president the power to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down the Internet. The bill would also require network administrators in the private sector receive licencing from the federal government after taking a federally-mandated certificagtion program. During Committee hearings, Rockefeller went so far as to say that it would have been better if the Internet had never been invented.
In November of last year it was reported that an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) being negotiated by the world's leading economies would force ISPs to cut off subscribers who were found to have shared copyrighted content on more than two occasions. Recent reports indicate that this proposal was not discussed at an ACTA meeting last month, but the so-called "three-strikes rule" has already passed in France.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that Obama's information czar, Cass Sunstein, has blamed the blogosphere for spreading anti-government sentiments and advocated that the government actually employ people to infiltrate online communities and spread information favorable to the government in an effort to destabilize them. As remarkable as such a proposal may seem from a high-ranking government official, it is only one aspect of an official Pentagon strategy to fight the net as if it were an enemy weapons system.

All of these proposals and numerous other stories we have reported on the past (e.g. here and here) represent only the latest attempts to stifle free speech on the Internet. Although groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been fighting such moves for a long time, the explosive power of the online community in derailing the carbon eugenics agenda and exposing the Federal Reserve has awakened many to the nascent medium's potential...and its value. The value of the Internet is directly tied to freedom of speech, a principle that is opposed solely by the establishment media who thrived for decades in a virtually competition-free era before the rise of the Internet. As one commenter on the Time Magazine puff piece calling for Internet licencing notes, "There is NO grass roots movement anywhere calling for government intervention in the internet. It is not broken. It works too well, that is a problem for tyrants."
As with everything related to the Internet, however, the collaborative efforts of concerned citizen in opposing Internet censorship is paying off in positive developments. The newfound awareness of the Internet's power and importance is raising awareness that online liberties are in fact fundamental rights that cannot be taken away. Even China was forced to back down from an Internet licencing scheme (exactly like that proposed at Davos) because of public pressure. A draconian Australian law that would have required all online political comments to be accompanied by the commenters full name and address is likely to be repealed by the Attorney General.
Whether or not these individual successes in fighting back the approach of online tyranny will ultimately derail the establishment's agenda remains to be seen. It depends largely on public outcry over the loss of online liberties becoming a genuine grassroots movement.
http://www.corbettreport.com/articles/20...orship.htm

[Peter Lemkin]

Maybe they'll even give tickets for looking at the 'wrong' kind of sites.....like this one....[really the correct kind]....and you thought WWF stood for World Wildlife Fund, no - I'm afraid it will soon stand for World Wide Fascism.....the trend on this Planet is worrying, at best; alarming most of the time; outright insane and treacherous at times......:vroam: Scotty, Beam me up!

[Magda Hassan]

Linux and open source software rules! :pcguru:

[Peter Presland]

....and you thought WWF stood for World Wildlife Fund, no - I'm afraid it will soon stand for World Wide Fascism.....

Unfortunate choice of acronym there Peter :embarassed: because the two are already synonymous - or rather have been since WWF inception:

This from 'Concious Ape' - but as I recall there's a lot on DPF about it too buried in stuff about Le Cercle Pinay, Brian Crozier and elswhere - especially the ISGP site.

1001 Club: Neo-Colonial MI6 Front

Founded in 1971 by former WWF president, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, together with his Nazi buddy, former SS officer, Bilderberg Group founder and MI6 agent, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the 1001 Club is officially billed as a ‘Nature Trust that helps fund the World Wide Fund for Nature’ (formerly the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF).
But in truth the 1001 Club is far less a nature trust, far more an MI6 front for covert action and the implementation of neo-colonial policies in central and southern Africa.


It is today well enough documented that the WWF, and subsequently the 1001 Club, were founded primarily as a legitimate cover for pursuing the geopolitical interests of the Anglo-European, and to some extent the American, power-elite. What is not so well-documented is that, ever since its inception, the 1001 Club has been the prime mover behind the monopolization of Africa’s gold, diamond, oil and mineral reserves— the prime money-laundering operation via which the criminal rape and pillage of the developing world has been, not only carried out, but legitimized.
The fact is Africa’s natural resources have been brutally and criminally extracted by Crown-allied corporations for decades, often utilizing MI6 channels and the 1001 Club/WWF as a cover....... etc etc

[David Guyatt]

Prince Bernhard was such a charming SS man. He spied for the Nazis during the war when he was living in London. At least, I believe that is the case. The British military didn't trust him at all and the King pleaded with them to give him a job of importance to placate him.

It is my position that he was the man who provided the Nazis with details of the top secret Operation Market Garden - the capture of the Dutch bridges culminating in the Bridge at Arnhem - ensuring that the operation failed, thus ensuring Nazi Germany's survival for another 8 months. Just enough time for Bormann to get all the Nazi loot and military technology/blueprints to safe havens -- and to make the necessary arrangements for Bormann, Himmler, Hitler and Eva Braun to escape justice after the war and emigrate to Latin America (as now seems the case)

And, of course, his German buddy, Prince Philip' had two two sisters who were married to fairly senior SS officers, one of whom was on Himmler's personal staff.

All very cozy...