Today a broad campaign called Reset The Net has launched with the tagline “Don’t ask for Your privacy. Take it back.” Today also marks the one year anniversary of the Edward Snowden leaks that showed the extent of the NSA data collection and surveillance activities. Reset The Net is meant to be a citizen and corporate response that uses technological means to thwart the NSA and other agencies like it. The basics of Reset the Net are indisputably good practices. Sites should use SSL to avoid session highjacking and eavesdropping. People should know that there are tools for encrypting private communications as well as tools for anonymizing their access to the web.
There are, however, two important ways in which we need to be careful about Reset the Net. First, technological means are not a substitute for political change including comprehensive reform of the NSA. As the heartbleed vulnerability showed and as Quinn Norton describes extensively in her post Everything is Broken, the complexity of existing systems is such that we cannot and should not rely on technology alone. There is a good chance that whatever system you are using has some kind of backdoor or exploitable flaw in it (and if it doesn’t today it might tomorrow as part of an upgrade).
Second, it would be a tragic loss if more and more of the net migrated into private, ephemeral and encrypted communications among small groups. Much of the net’s power to move us forward as a species comes from open collaboration and the potential of collective intelligence. Whether it is discovering great content from unknown writers or using patterns of queries to identify public health issues there are a myriad of ways we can all be better off when information is openly accessible. That is the fundamental promise of a network that connects every single human being on the planet and we should not lose sight of it.
