Futurists: Feds to squash online freedom
By Jon Fortt
HALF MOON BAY, Calif. – Tech visionary Lawrence Lessig made a sobering prediction Tuesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference: “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event,” he said, “an event that demonstrates the instability of the Internet, and that inspires the government to a response.”
He said he believes this digital disaster – a major hacker attack or other act of cyber-terrorism in the next 10 years – will prompt the U.S. government to clamp down on Internet freedoms in an online parallel to the Patriot Act.
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| Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig predicts that an online attack will prompt the government to clamp down on Internet freedoms. Photo: Gary Wagner |
Lessig, a Stanford Law School professor who founded its Center for Internet and Society, said he came to this conclusion after a conversation with former federal counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke. Lessig said Clarke told him that the Justice Department had already written up much of the Patriot Act before the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and that there is a similar proposal on the shelf in case of an Internet catastrophe. Advocates of Internet openness will not be thrilled about its contents, Lessig said. “Vint Cerf is not going to like it very much,” Lessig recalls Clark saying.
It just happened that Cerf, and Internet pioneer who now works for Google (GOOG), was in the audience. And the warning obviously got his attention.
The prediction was part of 2018: Life on the Net, a panel with tech thinkers Lessig, Joichi Ito, and Philip Rosedale. Conversation topics ranged from copyright policies to virtual worlds to mobile economies. The panelists were generally optimistic about how the Internet will develop – Rosedale, founder of virtual world Second Life, made an unsurprising prediction that virtual environments like his would comprise the majority of Internet traffic in a decade, for example. But their discussions about the potential pitfalls were a bit more entertaining.
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| Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joichi Ito said would-be investors in mobile technology should take a warning from Japan’s market. Photo: Gary Wagner |
Ito, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, had some words of warning for others investing in mobile businesses. In today’s fixed-line Internet, he said, the money that companies make from their ideas tends to get plowed back into the innovation economy, seeding startups like Facebook and Twitter. In Silicon Valley’s virtuous cycle, successful entrepreneurs and companies tend to keep the money circulating.
But no one should assume mobile will work the same way in the U.S.: Just look at Japan, where the mobile Internet is big. There, just as here, the wireless carriers who own the networks want a piece of the transactions that happen on their networks. The result is that in Japan, carriers have taken a sizable chunk of the spoils from successful ideas and sunk them into their own “bloated R&D labs,” Ito said.
But more importantly, will “government clampdown” really shut off the barrage of idiotic spam ?
Will the “government clampdown” really shut down the identity theft problem ?
Will the “government clampdown” really shut down the pornography industry ?
Ha !
If you want to preserve your freedoms then make your life so simple you need very little to be free.
Most of the whiners about the “government” are living high on the hog compared to most people in the world.
Will large-scale human-caused disasters happen in the future ? Sure will. No way to predict in advance who is responsible.
Marc
Working in IT in the fifth largest Electric Utility in the united states, i can tell you that we DO rely upon the ‘internet’ to maintain control of the power grid. A major loss in our VPN capability could in fact trigger a stability issue not unlike the east coast outage of a few years ago. It is a metter of how ‘perfect a storm’ could be created. The east coast blackout took all of 15 minutes to occur, and days to recover.
“Patrick, let’s not be naive. Cyberterrorism could affect the: electricity grid, financial markets (includes banking accounts-all linked by the Internet), personal documents (financial, educational, medical, you name it). Basic precautions? Unless you have your own power supply, bank, and no electronic links – then yes.”
This is the kind of paranoid fear-mongering that will be used to take control. Banks are EXTREMELY secure, encrypted and well protected. The power grid is also redundantly covered, and does NOT rely on the internet to maintain basic power (remember the Y2K scare that never happened?). Any large scale attack that was successful would HAVE to be done from the “inside”, by the government, for the express purpose of “clamping down” on those of us who are using the internet to expose the truth of the collectivist plans being executed every day by “big brother”.
If you really want to fear anything about technology related concerns, you might start thinking about artificial intellengence. How long before humans will only be an unneccessary nuisance.
I don’t understand how this should come as any surprise to anyone. And as for some future i-9/11 event…excuse me, but hasn’t one already occurred? What about the DDoS attack against Estonian businesses and government agencies in May of last year? It seems like the discussion from our so-called leaders about legislation centers around protecting us from terrorists…what about other countries? What’s to stop them from attacking us? A Patriot Act??? Oh for god’s sakes, let’s get real!
There is an entire generation of bumbling idiots in federal IT, in senior security positions, that don’t even know what a firewall is. You cannot speak for 2018 until you understand that the ones running the show then won’t be slaves to incompetent ‘no-can-do’ punch-card dinosaurs. They will have mercifully died out by then. Those fat, lazy dinosaurs no doubt will create their own cyber 9-11, and have many times over already. As for any enforcement before they retire, they will certainly screw that up in spades to boot. Expert…media fodder is all these ‘futurists’ are.
you are all cowards you want stand up to the government. You are hiding in front of a computer your just big talk and no action.
Any i-9/11 event will be perpetrated by the MAD MEN running our government.
“If they hadn’t shot down the fourth plane it would’ve hit the dome,” Stone, a Navy officer, said in his opening remarks.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080723/ts_nm/guantanamo_hearings_hamdan_dc
There is always a way around anything that they can do.
I am sick of these fear mongering, lying bastards, who trample all over our Constitution.
I will fight for my freedom even if the foe is the US government.
People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.
I have no problems leading a new American revolution. Revolution is our right as Americans.
The future of the internet is already here.
http://www.searchtheentirecraigslist.com
Long name…Results you want.
Mobile economies sounds very interesting.
I concur some of the threats/risks are real from “cyberterrorism”. However, I fear far more the creeping powers provided by the Patriot Act (without a sunset provision) that are wheeled by those that believe the ends justify the means. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, a people willing to give up its freedom for temporary security normally gets what it deserves. People forget in the 50s and 60s the US Govt performed some pretty distasteful experiments on unknowing citizens in the name of national security, this is factual not fictional.
Beware of those who seek to protect us.
Patrick, let’s not be naive. Cyberterrorism could affect the: electricity grid, financial markets (includes banking accounts-all linked by the Internet), personal documents (financial, educational, medical, you name it). Basic precautions? Unless you have your own power supply, bank, and no electronic links – then yes.
i-911, that’s funny! FEAR FEAR FEAR… let’s give control to the terrorists… afterall I fear the liars in power here in the states more than religious extremests… actually the only religious extremists are the christians around here. lol
it would take one hell of a coordinated effort and if it happens, it couldn’t have happened without DARPA’s and homeland security’s help… kinda like the 911 false flag. get your head out America, turn off the TV, they’re trying to get you to buy into this NWO by making you think you NEED it!!! like we needed protection from Saddam’s WMD’s lol
I think all these predictions are correct. If you look at any emerging technology the last 150 years, they all went these directions based on changes, threats, consolidation, and growth (ie the railroad, electricity, automobiles, etc.) By far the mosting exciting future for the Web will be a Second Life-like world, where people begin to invest large amounts of their time and energy in new vitrual worlds online. I see this industry unfolding the next 10 years and becoming a huge presence around the world the next 50.
Well, the i-911 event will certainly be perpetrated by the government-or with thier knowledge- and a wink and a nod.Really no different than the 9-11 event which percipitated the draconian anti-constitution (UN)patriot act!
Doubtful… the internet is too resilient and redundant. Exactly what do you think they’ll attack?
Most likely anyone who has taken at least basic precautions will come away unscathed from this “i 911″
Sounds like 1984 is about to strike. Big brother will not only watch, he will control and censor.
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I’d like a review of these futurists’ ability to adequately frame the future for us. What are their track records, not as a group but as individuals. It doesn’t take much insight to see that our lives in North America will continue to be more and more dependent on technology.
Just wondering how much credibility I should give this ‘prediction’ of disaster. But then, disaster predicters have always gotten the headlines, look at Chicken Little.
As far as an i911, look what Russian hacksters did to Estonia a couple years ago. Completely took the country’s internet offline. Granted, it was only a couple weeks. What would happen if the U.S.’s internet went offline for a couple weeks? By offline, I mean no IP traffic in or out of the country.