An open internet enables a free flow of ideas transforming the lives of every human on the planet.
As in the real, offline, physical world there are both good actors & bad actors. Who or what is good actor is relative to where we live, what we believe & how much freedom we have in the offline world.
In the same manner that the knife that cuts bread
can also be used as a dagger to murder, the internet
has been weaponised for evil.
This essay examines the internet, privacy & freedom.
Control the internet. Control the world?
Control of the internet is in the hands of anyone
who has the capacity to impact internet traffic.
To impact internet traffic, an entity must have one or more capabilities to:
Censor
Monitor
Misdirect
Attack
Restrict
Governments have the capacity to do all of the above at certain choke points, at which internet traffic is vulnerable to third party access including:
The computer
Wifi hotspot
ISP (internet service provider)
Internet gateway
The undersea cable and/or satellite service.
TCP/IP, the backbone of the internet, was created by Robert E Kahn & Vint Cerf. Vint Cerf spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations on internet freedom.
Freedom of the Press
Any capability to manipulate the internet is
the capability to impact freedom of the press
at any time; anywhere .
Reporters sans frontières (Reporters Without Borders) indexes the state of press freedom.
uProxy.org
One attempt to bypass potential internet choke points is the Google Ideas, now Alphabet's Jigsaw seeded uProxy: a peer to peer gateway.
Of course, Brave New Software & the University of Washington's uProxy.org is blocked in the Reporters Without Borders red countries.
An open internet?
via Barack Obama.
A free internet means that everyone, with access to a free internet, is free to communicate & express themselves.
When I was a candidate for this office, I made clear my commitment to a free and open Internet & my commitment remains as strong as ever.
President Barack Obama, Medium
Obama's free & open internet includes:
No blocking.
If a consumer requests access to a website or service & the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it. That way, every player — not just those commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your business.
No throttling.
Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow down some content or speed up others — through a process often called throttling — based on the type of service or your ISP’s preferences.
Increased transparency.
The connection between consumers & ISPs — the so-called last mile — is not the only place some sites might get special treatment. So, I am also asking the FCC to make full use of the transparency authorities the court recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the Internet.
No paid prioritization.
Simply put: No service should be stuck in a slow lane because it does not pay a fee. That kind of gate keeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth. So, as I have before, I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction that has a similar effect.
Do Americans want freedom or security?
Most Americans don't want freedom; they want security
Edward Snowden
What do citizens in countries of the free world want? Security or freedom?
How much freedom are they willing to trade some for an assurance of security?
Is your privacy only violated when someone takes your pictures & posts them online?
Will your privacy be violated in the moment when someone, even a government, is interested in your pictures & stores them?
What impact does somebody grabbing your data & storing it have because law enforcement may want to use it?
Is the threat of that we might be recorded sometime, somewhere not something that we are all subconsciously aware of?
Should an intelligence agency scour for information, scoop it up & store it on the basis that it might need it later?
Are we aware of the trade off that in personal information we make for free internet products? Like Google & Facebook, where we ourselves are the product? Where our data, our information anonymized or not is sliced & diced to the highest bidder?
Have we acquiesced to the oversight of surveillance industrial complex's deep state?
Right & wrong is a different standard from legal & illegal Edward Snowden
The SICK BRIC.
The elephant in the room is internet for China by Beijing fiat: the Great Firewall of China.
No access to Facebook
The SICK countries
Syria
Iran
China
North Korea
Facebook IPO
China's walled garden protects 700 million daily active users making the world's largest national internet market the world's biggest controlled internet. In addition, the Orwellian Golden Shield Project is a catalyst for Big Brother type self-censorship.
The Dark Web
What we know to be the internet is really the surface web.
All of the above is applicable to the open, public or surface web, which is a miniscule 4% of the internet.
When we use a university website resource or a government portal, not indexed by Google or other search engines, we are usually using the deep web.
Of the deep web, the dark web is the component of the internet that intentionally remains hidden.
While we generically refer to the dark net or the dark web, the dark web is not a single entity, but many dark webs that could be independent of one another.
Surface Web:
any website or page that can be indexed
& easily searched by search engines like
Google.
Deep Web:
anything on the internet that cannot be indexed
& searched directly by a public search engine.
e.g. government or educational websites with
their own internal search.
Dark Web:
the part of Deep Web that does not want to be found.
The sales pitch
A censor free web
In large parts of the world, just being yourself
online is enough to get you arrested.
Encrypted technologies can be a lifesaver.
Sheera Frankel
Buzzfeed
Tahrir Square, Cairo was the first revolution in the history of mankind that was pre-announced.
They never thought it would come ... almost everyone owned the idea of promoting this ... everyone was a part of the campaign ... the page was anonymous ... no one owned the page ... the internet sparked the revolution ... mainly Facebook .... our role was to create the snowball. .. .to break the psychological barrier of fear.
What we did was a reflection of the street ...
Dictators are going to have a tough time ... user to user is getting bigger and bigger ... It's becoming harder and harder to hide information ...
Wael Ghonim
Wael Ghonim, then a Google Arabia executive based in Dubai played a key role in the Egyptian revolution.
Bitnation Pangea
While Bitnation operates on the surface web, Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof's vision of the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) based Decentralized Borderless Voluntary Nation (DBVN) is optimally realized through the anonymity of the dark web.
Bitnation, the world's first operational Decentralized Borderless Voluntary Nation is an Ethereum blockchain powered jurisdiction, providing the same services traditional governments provide, including dispute resolution, insurance & security.
The hive mind
Today, cybernetics has laid the theoretical foundation for creating a hive mind of humans, humanoids, trans humans, robots, non-humans & other artificial intelligence.
Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence & digital intelligence.
It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain & the digital version of yourself, particularly output.
Elon Musk
The dark web facilitates the free flow of ideas, technologies & philosophies without any legal restraint, ethical review or moral override. In the crucible of the dark web creative destruction, on steroids, runs rampant.
Ideas having sex with each other.
Matt Ridley
We will see that the 1.5 kg (3 lb) of bees in a honeybee swarm, just like the 1.5 kg (3 lb) of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective.
Thomas Seeley, Honeybee Democracy
Whenever you have revolutionary progress,
it always starts underground.
Ajelandro Cacares & Amanda Towler,
DARPA
MEMEX
Do some things deserve to stay in the dark?
Should everything be in the light?
Caveat emptor
Not only caveat emptor, but also caveat venditor let the seller beware.
Are advocates of the dark web aware of the Pandora's box that anonymity will empower?
Cannibalism
DIY cannibalism
comprehensive guide for cooking women. We’re not talking about a short joke here.
This page had information on what body types to use for specific cuts, how to prepare these cuts & how to cook the girl so she lives as long as possible.
12 Scary things which happen when you go on the dark web
Human trafficking
Through Tor, the dark web is the engine for human trafficking. Even as abused children are younger & child pornography is more sickeningly violent, Thorn is a proven cutting edge digital weapon in the war against child trafficking.
Palpatine's Revenge
Drugs, porn, weapons &
hitmen or assassins for hire
on the dark web.
Contract via the blockchain: smart contract
Pay via the blockchain: BTC, ETH
Buyer & seller: anonymous on the dark web
Was there a BTC 89.2K (~US$ 250M) dark web contract on the life of a sitting US President?
RR: Rod Rosenstein, MF: Michael Flynn, Limey: Christopher Steele, former MI6?
The Empire Strikes Back
How can the government stop terrorists & criminals
without hurting freedom of expression?
On behalf of governments, companies like Chainalyis & Sixgill crawl the dark web for criminals.
Bitcoin & other virtual currencies are decentralized & ... resistant to censorship restraint. Receiving Bitcoin can be done by anyone with basic computing equipment anywhere in the world. This accessibility & the inability for governments to quash these technologies, offers nefarious actors the ability to abuse the technology.
Jonathan Levin, co-founder, Chainalysis
Sixgill, an Israeli application probes the dark web to identify & predict patterns of criminal activity, by continuous mass surveillance of the dark web to try & spot criminal activity, hacks or leaks before they occur.
Privacy : ideas :: evolution : biology.
Is the anonymous internet indispensable for the marketplace of ideas?
Do you want real freedom?
Or just enough freedom to be comfortable?
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