Data protection: Angela Merkel proposes Europe network

But please make no mistake. The extreme right is still popular in Germany and generally in northwest Europe, in some places commanding ~35% of the votes. Far left (meaning having political positions not even American "communists" would support) commands another 10-15% of the vote, even in East Germany where, let's just say that a lot of the population has good reason to distrust them.

I agree 100%, but the problem is we don't get a unilateral vote.

Geopolitically it makes perfect sense for authoritarian regimes to engage in cyberwar. All legality aside, they would be stupid not to.

There is not much anyone (UN, EU, etc.) can do about it. We're not going to declare war (in the kinetic sense) over the cyber equivalent of spying/covert ops. We're not going to engage in sanctions that strangle both our economies over the cyber equivalent of spying/covert ops.

And they know that, just as well as we do. There is every incentive for them to do it, and essentially no disincentive.

So the cyberwar is on. (And, it's been on).

And that's not even getting into the transnational actors who abuse seams and gaps of jurisdictional boundaries between law enforcement, national intelligence, "dual-use" civilian/military networks, etc. in order to organize their own activities.

The best thing we can do is extremely good defense (which due to scale must be mostly passive with few active measures employed). And we should pursue that, but market pressures will always, always go against that.

Even if the U.S. were to, say, regulate that computer systems should be designed to combat security vulnerabilities (and NIST has just released a guideline on that), other nations would not necessarily do that and so nations without that requirement could run rings around U.S. software shops by releasing buggier software first and with faster feature iteration cycles. And that's assuming you could "fix the market" with proper regulation in the first place, which is certainly unclear.

And where would open source software fall into that? Do we want to forbid individual devs from uploading their wares to GitHub until they've completely a 27-page checklist?

> Here, the NSA were really acting against their best interest by weakening existing defenses.

In fairness AFAICS the one crypto standard they weakened was only weakened against NSA, not in general (though that would certainly not make you feel better if you were trying to hide from NSA). But at the same time I never figured out specifics on whether NSA was convincing companies to ship known-broken code, actively adding other backdoors, or what. But if their involvement was limited to convincing companies like Cisco to default to Dual EC DRBG then that's not nearly as bad as convincing Cisco to ship a broken zlib.

> Having several barriers of entry is good practice in security, why not just make sure that there are secured channels with stronger security for sensitive data.

Even without market pressures, the fact is that cyber defense falls prey to the fact that the attacker generally need only be right once, which the defender must be right every time. I hate to be Debbie Downer here but you're speaking to an extremely hard problem, and it doesn't get any easier if you take all the other possible tools away.

Certainly there are industries taking more stringent precautions, but the problem is that the bum-standard civilian Internet is itself "critical infrastructure", and is the hardest thing to make secure (just witness the spread of NTP-based DDoS attacks). Having citadels of security in a floating maelstrom of unprotected Internet is not security at the national level.

> I believe that having an international net greatly helps in preventing wars by building relations between entities in different countries and spreading culture. Let's not forget about the negative effects that would come from shutting this system down by introducing country-nets.

Well a counterargument is that an international net has allowed smart propaganda arms from all sources to drum up more hatred for America (I'm not speaking merely of things America deserves and should receive blame for.... e.g. both sides in Egypt blamed America and thought America was supporting the other). To be clear, neither the U.S. media or government has managed to engage in "smart" propaganda since the Cold War and the Internet has made the USG in particular look flat-footed.

Look around the Internet and all I see is Europeans calling us fat, making fun of how we measure distance, write and speak our dates (and all this despite American coders at MS being careful to add locale and translation support to their software), and more or less begging for us to take any overseas extension we have back to America.

While I will say that I do prefer an international, open network just as you do, those demanding America to go home may yet get their wish......

At one point there was a building on the Isle of Dogs (former island in the Thames) through which an absolutely terrifying proportion of the network traffic for western Europe travelled.

And contracts are not forever.

The thing it, while many of the people who vote Tory want the UK to leave Europe, the people who actually fund the Conservative party make a lot of money from being part of the EU. The disconnect between the voters and the funders of the Conservative Party has been a defining feature of theirs for decades.

This is why mentioning Europe is so destructive for them, because they have to stay in Europe, but cannot publicly admit that.