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Comment by rurounijones | Hacker News Reader

If you want to break up with the US on the web you need to do at least two things (and probably many more).

1. Start laying (more) cables between countries that do not pass through US territory. [1]

2. Encourage home-grown innovation and services so that people are not all using services under authority of US sovereignty.

[1] And try and stop the US from tapping them...

Good luck...

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This is not impossible though.

China has done this with their Great Firewall and web firms such as Baidu (search engine), QQ (like Facebook), Weibo (like Twitter), etc. I believe EU and Russia also have the capability to do the same if they want to. For the rest of the world, they can license a copy from one of the three and host their own server farms.

This is not a bright future to have though: the Internet would become an actual inter-net among a few huge LANs.

China is way ahead of the game... that's for sure. There's no arguing that.

But the rest of the world is pretty dependent on the US when it comes to the internet. This include the EU and Russia. And this is not something that is trivial to change.

I am not saying that it WON'T change... I'm saying that for the rest of the world to create a China-like internet for their citizens may be desirable, but it won't be easy.

I mean... if I was Brazilian, I would much rather the Brazilian Government watched my internet usage than to have the American Government do so. Because the American Government can put you on a No-Fly list and you have no recourse. (ie - no rights in US Courts). Consequently, you have no easy way off of that list.

So I understand the desire... I just think it will be more difficult than flipping a switch.

>Because the American Government can put you on a No-Fly list and you have no recourse. (ie - no rights in US Courts).

The American government could put you on a No-Fly list, but your own government could put you in a cage.

Heh...

So can the American Government.

The difference is...

if your own Government puts you in a cage...

you actually have rights.

But - the American government probably isn't going to care if you say terrible things about your own, or if you're looking at porn, or cheating on taxes or denying the holocaust, or about any number of things that could get you into trouble on your home turf.

I'm not saying America in this case isn't a threat, it is abstractly, but it can also be the lesser evil.

Instead of using services under authority of US sovereignty. We can all use services under authority of our own governments. True freedom will be reached then.

/sarcasm

I get what you're saying. I do notice that myself is getting more cynical nowadays. On the positive side though you can push changes to your own government, while there is nothing you can do to the USA.

I think there are a number of self-serving incentives for countries to pursue a "national firewall" model. Many of the same governments which (justifiably though maybe also cynically) decry the scope of US surveillance would probably welcome a closed network which makes it easier to perform their own domestic surveillance while appearing to liberate their people from the bogeyman of American tyranny. Content filtering (censorship) and national version of "American" sites like Facebook and Google (of course, all of which would filter money and data back to the motherland) are win-wins for the state as well.

3. encourage end-to-end encryption. If all the US sees is encrypted traffic, it makes it a lot harder for the NSA to extract useful information from it.

Yes, I was going to mention that but first you need #2 done since, as we have seen with Lavabit, End to End encryption is no good if one end can be forced to surrender their keys.

That applies much less to non-US entities communicating to other non-US entities who happen to have significant bandwidth between them running through the United States.

> since, as we have seen with Lavabit, End to End encryption is no good if one end can be forced to surrender their keys.

I'm not sure I made myself clear: my position is that the encryption needs to be done on each end-user's PC, not on some centralised service such as Lavabit.

While the USA could extract the secrets from one person, if that person is living in the USA, it is harder fro them to do so to people outside the USA. Although they could burgle people's houses and extract information that way, it doesn't scale and they certainly couldn't do it to all the people in a country.

Ah right, I do not consider that a feasible thing right now.

How would facebook (or the non US equivalent) work if data was encrypted on everyone's PC. There is no PKI that would support that at the moment (Although a social network that also acts as a PKI is an interesting idea.)

as we have seen with Lavabit, End to End encryption is no good if one end can be forced to surrender their keys.

Lavabit was the middleman in the communication, not the end; or was it?

I am talking on the network level. Connection between client and server.

> Start laying (more) cables between countries that do not pass through US territory.

Also territories that have data sharing deals and probably most allies.

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