Dead End?

Yours truly loves the net. I can honestly say I have been using it since the time of Arpa, phones placed in modem/headsets ( War Games ) and 6 kilobaud data rates, to talk to other geeks about the wonders of an environment years before the advent of Mosaic, the first GUI web browser that was developed, in large part, by the research done by  Tim Berners-Lee @ Cern using the NeXT computer  to create the HTTP protocol that all browsers use to access the web. During this time, we all have seen the tremendous changes, for both good and bad, wrought by the web upon the world at large but it's now under attack by the powers at be, slowly changing this wonderful and wild environment into something Orwell would understand as the start point to 1984.

Last week we learned that U.S. and British intelligence agencies have broken the back of digital encryption - the coded technology hundreds of millions of Internet users rely on to keep their communications private.

Over the weekend, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA and its British counterpart are also hacking into smartphones to monitor our daily lives in ways that wouldn't have been possible before the age of the iPhone.

This news, just the latest revelations from the files of Edward Snowden, only heighten our sense that we can no longer assume anything we say or do online is secure.

But that's not all. In a case that was heard in a U.S. federal appeals court on Monday, telecommunications colossus Verizon is arguing that it has the First Amendment right to block and censor Internet users. (That's right. Verizon is claiming that, as a corporation, it has the free speech right to silence the online expression of everybody else.)

It's come to this. Government and corporate forces have joined to chip away at two pillars of the open Internet: the control of our personal data and our right to connect and communicate without censorship or interference.

When looking at this, one sees, courtesy of the net that's under siege, how government, in collusion with big corporations, is trying to change the net in ways that impact us all. The question to ask is, what are we going to do about it? Click here to help stop this nonsense before it's too late, our freedom really does depend on it if we don't.

End of rant.