On the home stretch to a victory that could prove Pyrrhic
Last week, President Barack Obama announced his support for Senator Joe Lieberman’s (I-CT) Cybersecurity Act of 2012. His support comes from a recognition that the United States is particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks. I agree with him that we are particularly vulnerable, and need to do something about it. But we have a delicate balance to consider when examining our options. The fulcrum of that balance is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Before we look at ICANN, let’s look at Lieberman’s bill.
The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 would establish a set of performance standards for various companies and organizations who are responsible for “critical infrastructure”, a term defined in the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (more commonly known by its acronym: USA PATRIOT Act). Those who meet those performance standards are exempted from liability for violating privacy laws in cases of disclosing private information to law enforcement.
In a general sense, the bill is pretty well conceived. Disclosures must accompany a belief that it is related to a suspected cybersecurity attack. It may give a little too much leeway to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to examine the contents of people’s Internet traffic, but it’s unclear that they have much freedom in that regard.
Where the Act falls short is in a way that many bills in the past (such as SOPA, PIPA, and DMCA) have also fallen short, in recognizing that the Internet is international. To understand what I mean requires us to look a bit at how the Internet works.
When you type “www.logarchism.com” into your browser, your computer has to find the internet protocol (IP) address of this site, which it does by contacting your domain name service (DNS) server. It’s akin to looking in the phone book for the telephone number corresponding to a person’s name. There are tens of thousands of DNS servers out there, and odds are that the one you use is run by your ISP. But there are so many domains in existence that your ISP’s DNS server isn’t necessarily going to have in its database the listing your computer is looking for. If it doesn’t, it can look further up the chain as illustrated in the tree here (i.e., if it doesn’t have “www.logarchism.com”, it may have “logarchism.com”, or merely “com”), and ask the DNS server that owns that portion of the Internet’s domains for the information. Every DNS server must have in its database all of the listings of the next level (i.e., the owner of “com” [Network Solutions] has every single “.com” domain in its database). At the very root of the Internet is a series of servers, run by ICANN, that handle the top-level domains (TLDs) such as “com”, “net”, “org”, “edu”, “mil”, and all of the two-letter country domains.
ICANN, then, is at the root of all domains.
And where is ICANN? They’re in Marina del Rey, a district of Los Angeles, California…in the United States. And that means that the United States Congress thinks they can control the Internet by asserting jurisdiction over ICANN. In the very short run, they’re right. But in the long run, they’re very, very wrong.
The office tower in Marina Del Rey which is home to the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute and ICANN
There’s a reason that ICANN resides in the United States. The Internet is the evolution of DARPAnet, created by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency as a network architecture to be resilient to nuclear attacks on the United States taking out large portions of the nation’s infrastructure. The original DNS infrastructure consisted of Jon Postel, one man at the University of Southern California, who maintained a list of all domain names which he periodically published to people who could then install the database on their own local servers. Astonishingly, he maintained this list until his death in 1998. ICANN was set up to replace Postel (who, had he not met an untimely demise, would have been ICANN’s first chief technology officer) with an organization and infrastructure to be far more resilient than a single person.
But in shifting control of the Internet from one man to an organization, coupled with the rapid growth of the Internet all over the world, the countries that happen not to be called “The United States of America” were concerned about control of the Internet belonging to the United States government, who would have the power to shut off Internet access to other nations at will. At that time, governments outside the US were pushing for control of IP addresses and domain names to be handled by the United Nations. As you might imagine, the prospect of UN control over the Internet did not appeal to Congressional Republicans, who on principle have long opposed the very existence of the UN.
In order to keep control of the Internet geographically within the United States, ICANN was formed with bylaws that are designed to prevent the US government from exerting jurisdictional control over the Internet. In other words, as long as the US government remains a benign host, control over the Internet can remain in Marina del Rey.
Which brings us back to these cybersecurity bills. The more power the United States government exerts over the Internet, particularly ICANN, and especially under the justification of national security, the greater the likelihood that the functions currently handled by ICANN will move to the United Nations. If it goes to the UN, Russia and China will have significantly more influence over issues such as privacy, national security, and censorship. And that would result in the US having less, rather than more, control over the overall security of the Internet and our national security, to say nothing of the free expression of ideas that we take for granted today on the Internet.
It’s hard at times for Americans to realize just how much we take for granted. We must be aware of the delicate balance between the US and the rest of the world in control over the Internet. And we must, then, tread lightly in attempting to push our ideals onto the Internet over the objections of the rest of the world.
Related articles
- Thread: What does ICANN do? (threads.scripting.com)
- ICANN Wins IANA Contract Bid (internetnews.me)
- ICANN Leadership Confusion? (internetnews.me)
- U.S. Commerce Department Retains Icann as Web’s Address Manager — Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
Excellent article, Michael. You’re absolutely right that it’s easy to forget how much we take for granted, especially with regard to the way the Internet works. It would be so easy for things to change, and not to our liking.
Has the whole site changed format, or have I screwed something up?
It looks normal when I log on but if I click on a comment, I get a compressed version of all recent articles in a really wide format that I have to scroll across to read.
filistro,
I think something may have gotten messed up in your cache somewhere. That seems to have happened to many of us at one time or another. Clearing your browser cache should solve it, but let me know if it doesn’t and I can help you diagnose.
Thanks, Michael… that worked.
Yesterday we hiked out to a historic RCMP graveyard… something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s deserted and abandoned on the prairie in Saskatchewan, miles from anywhere, a silent, tidy grouping of gravestones surrounded by nothing but tall waving grass, a small herd of antelope and a couple of circling hawks overhead. The men in the graves were young Mounties (at that time the force was called the Northwest Mounted Police) who were killed in the late 1800’s during the last of the Blackfoot uprisings, or who died of various illnesses in this isolated posting.
We wandered among the gravestones and talked about what these kids, living in such vast lonely isolation, would have thought of the Internet. Imagine a technology that unites the entire world, is readily accessible to almost everybody and contains the massed knowledge and retained history of the human population since the beginning of time… everything from cooking to quantum mechanics.
We asked each other… when did we first become aware that such a technology was even remotely possible? It’s already hard to remember a world without it. Not the computer itself… I clearly recall decades ago seeing “2001, a Space Odyssey” and the creepy meltdown of Hal the computer. The Internet uses the computer, of course, but it’s a completely different concept to connect everybody’s computers. If you are old enough to recall a world without the Internet, how long ago did you first realize that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually being built?
No wonder the world of nations is having a hard time deciding how to organize, govern and share this behemoth. It’s virtually brand new, yet already it literally dominates almost every aspect of our lives.
There is a mindset which holds that anything the US wants to do, it should do, and this is Right and Proper and perhaps ordained by some Higher Power.
Further, there is a mindset which holds that US “national security considerations” should take priority over all other considerations, including individual rights. Unless, of course, a president of the Other Party claims something to be a “national security consideration”.
I’m not certain these are always productive approaches to the world, or even to “national security.”
WikiLeaks has proved this whole House of Cards known as the internet er cyberspace er national security er personal privacy could all tumble down soon ie implode …
Stay tuned!
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to — The Outer Limits.
btw, back in the day the transistor radio was all the rage lol. If I had a choice of growin’ up in the ‘50s/60s vs now, hmm not a close call.
ok, ok, getting up from the couch to change the tv channel was such a drag.
I digress
filistro,
The dividing line was in the 70’s. Before that, although computers that talked and answered questions were a staple of science fiction as far back as the 50’s (and appeared in Star Trek, for example), it was fiction. After that, it started to become reality.
The rumors of Arpanet were what clued me in. By the early 80’s I was on usenet, reading net news and billboards and downloading software from ftp sites. After that, it was a pretty straightforward evolution to http://WWW. Not that it hasn’t been a wild ride, and a bit faster than expected…
@shortchain… By the early 80’s I was on usenet, reading net news and billboards and downloading software from ftp sites
That’s 30 years ago! I had no idea that sort of thing was available in the early 80’s.
In the late 80’s I quit my day job to write full-time and we bought a used IBM computer for me to work on because I’m a terrible typist and was using gallons of whiteout on my ms. pages. That computer was as big my desk, came with an indecipherable instruction manual, had “printer problems” every day, and had so little memory that I needed to load a couple of floppy disks to run a basic word-processing program. I thought it was absolutely the grteatest thing since sliced bread.
And here you were, already tooling around on the forerunner of the Internet! So when DID personal computers first start talking to each other? Did you do it all by dial-up, or what?
filistro,
usenet developed out of the unix-to-unix copy program (uucp). But before usenet was actually created there was a limited electronic mail capability created using uucp. uucp was created in the late 70’s to allow machines not hooked up to the internet to communicate with each other (dial-up, of course).
It was a store-and-forward design, rather than a client-server design like http://WWW. Before that there were the billboards — but I never got into those.
I was a node on usenet back in the early 80’s, running on an early unix machine.
It started at 1200 baud, then 2400, then 9600, and finally at about 38400. As the internet took form (in the shape of a high-speed network of computers at a bunch of military and educational sites around the country) my local upstream uucp node hooked in to the internet and became an ISP.
Personal computers migrated out of the universities and some companies in the early 80’s, but all people did from home mostly was work on floppies they brought home. Then in the 90’s some ftp sites started to appear, and usenet news started getting busy.
filistro,
With PCs it was all dialup in the 1980s and for a good chunk of the 1990s. Most people in the 1980s connected to local bulletin board systems, the bulk of which were run by enthusiasts. Around 1990 many of these BBSes hooked together in replication networks, which was kind of like a poor man’s USEnet. While all of this was going on, people in academia and government were hooked into the Internet, but at that time the Internet had restricted access. Also around this time were paid services (CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL) that hooked subsets of people to each other via their own private networks.
It wasn’t until the Internet was permitted to support commercial activity (1994) that all of the other systems began to fade away. None of them could compete with the Internet on content or price.
@filistro
I wasn’t quite as cutting-edge as shortchain, but I had email at my school (student coded/developed using UNIX/Telnet and ELM or PINE, I forget which) twenty-five years ago. My classmates and I were regular “gopher” users and many of us belonged to usenet groups where we would post things to one another. Anyone else remember “talk” and “ytalk” for real-time instant messaging? My “mclever” monicker actually dates all the way back the mid-80s, because I didn’t want the nerdy guys on the sci-fi usenet to know I was a grl. Most thought it was a play on M.C. Hammer, which I didn’t mind.
shortchain… most of what you said there is pretty incomprehensible to me… but I do have a vivid memory of my own first experience with the Internet in 1996. At the time we were living in a remote lakeside home on Indian land, about as far from an urban setting as you could imagine, and I had published several books by then but never met another living writer.
After we got internet access, I logged on for the first time in fear and trembling, and found a writers site where (with many fits, starts, losses of signal and frustrating disruptions) I actually had an online conversation with a group of other writers. It was truly one of the most exciting moments of my life. For days afterwards, I could hardly sleep or eat… I just wanted to be on the Internet. In those days it often took an hour or two to log on by dial-up, and the household phone was out of commission the whole time.
When I tell my totally plugged-in grandkids about that now, they shake their heads in amazement.
Michael… is it fair to say the Internet is primarily an American invention? Were these applications you describe being developed concurrently in other countries, or did America pretty much pioneer the whole concept of a network of linked computers?
filistro,
Yes. The protocols were developed by Americans, the backbone was developed in the US, and the funding for all of it came from the US government and academic institutions.
That’s a tougher call. Linking computers together was something that happened in a lot of places. But the Internet is more than merely linking computers together. It is linking them together in a way that is particularly resistant to failure, because of an architecture that supports multiple redundant paths from one point to another, coupled with numerous “self-healing” technologies embedded in the protocols themselves.
The Internet architecture’s greatest weakness is placing too much trust in the network health protocols, which allows for people to intentionally create unintended network behavior…but that’s a topic for another day.
@Michael… Yes. The protocols were developed by Americans, the backbone was
developed in the US, and the funding for all of it came from the US
government and academic institutions.
That’s what I thought. So why then do you think you must “tread lightly in attempting to push our ideals onto
the Internet over the objections of the rest of the world?”
If you invented it and funded it, you should retain the right to dictate how it functions, no? Or are you not advocating from a moral imperative so much as advising a light touch so the control doesn’t shift to the UN and via that route get into the hands of bad actors?
I’m not a big proponent of some natural right to rule born of “American exceptionalism” and all that (every country is exceptional in its own way) but I do believe in intellectual property rights, and the unassailable right of creators to maintian control over their creation.
Or… like institutions that are too big to fail, has the Internet become too massive for anybody to control?
I believe my Compaq used a dial-up Hayes 300 baud modem in the 81–82 timeframe and I subscribed to CompuServe and DowJones services.
filistro,
One might think so, but there’s really nothing that would prevent the UN or any other consortium of countries from duplicating the relevant parts and basically excluding the US from all of the rest of the world’s Internet.
Exactly.
Certainly many facets are too much for anyone to really control.
We should also point out that the WWW was not an exclusively American invention. The protocols, yes, and the internet, yes. But not the system that runs on top of the protocols. CERN was seminal in that development.
@filistro
Your story of how the household phone was out of commission for the entire time you were logged in brings back memories. Our dormitory phones came with call-waiting enabled, and call-waiting interrupting a dial-up session was the worst! Because it would take another eternity to get logged back in again. Had to remember to pre-pend the dial-up number with “*70„” to make sure it disabled call-waiting. And then I’d get complaints from my mother because she could never get hold of me!
It’s amazing to think how much technology–especially the public interaction via the Internet–has changed in such a short time. When I was first introduced to it, “browsing” the network required knowing the path you wanted and using UNIX commands to navigate to the correct directory, and then waiting for-EVER for the dial-up connection. The few nerdy kids who were on-line spent hours hunched over a clunky PC in a musty computer lab, or stuck in their dorm room (or parents’ basement) if lucky enough to have a computer and modem of their own, sucking down Mountain Dew in the wee hours of the morning. No pretty graphical interface. Everything at the command line. Only the geeks got it.
Now, it seems like everyone has a mobile phone. Kids can click on a half-dozen websites while texting and chatting at the mall. Got a question? You can look up the answer in seconds. People with virtually no technical knowledge can connect, search, and browse limitless information with the tap of a finger on their little personal screens. No wires. No command-line prompts. No busy signals while waiting for dial-up to connect… Though, somehow, getting to the page you want still seems to take forever.
I recall those days well. I was quite active on bulletin board systems starting in the early 80s. A few usenet newsgroups, too (I occasionally find stuff I wrote way back then — thirty years ago — when I google for it. NOTHING on the net ever dies.)
@DC… NOTHING on the net ever dies.
You know, that worries me quite a lot. Though (as Michael can attest
) I am morbidly cautious about what I personally put on the Internet, I still hate the idea that it is getting all clogged up with billions and trillions of bytes of totally useless junk. (I’m the kind of housekeeper who goes through closets and drawers, throwing out everything we haven’t used in the past year or two. I like sparseness.)
So will it be like this forever, with nothing ever getting removed from the net… or will somebody eventually invent giant scrubbers, sort of like electronic algae eaters, that constantly browse the Web and gobble up anything that looks outdated or useless?
@DC
You guys have a real knack for making me feel young.… Thanks!
@filistro
I don’t expect the Internet to ever get cleaned up–not as long as content is maintained by users.
What I expect may eventually happen is some sort of major technological overhaul that renders the current network architecture and data storage systems obsolete. Then, when it becomes too cumbersome to migrate everything forward to the new system, the garbage will get shelved on a legacy network that only the geeks and nerds of the future will bother to access. But it will never really go away.
@Mac… Because it would take another eternity to get logged back in again.
Wasn’t it awful? Especially in the BBS’s. You’d finally get there, start a fascinating conversation with somebody and then… ZOT!… one of you would vanish without warning and not reappear for an hour or two.
I used to think it was like climbing Mount Everest… you finally get all the way to the top and are enjoying the view when you’re suddenly, unceremoniously tumbled all the way back down to Base Camp One and have to start that slow, tedious climb all over again. It’s a wonder we persisted… but the thrill when you finally got there was worth it, I guess.
@Mac… You guys have a real knack for making me feel young.…
Oh c’mon. You’re just a baby duck!
@filistro
It was awful, but in some ways I miss the immediacy of some of the old chat technology where you could see the other person’s key strokes in real-time. If they got going on a really long monologue, you could even interrupt, just like a real conversation.
Today’s instant message and text technologies are clunkier in some ways, but I’ll gladly trade real-time keystrokes for the flexibility of anytime/anywhere instant messages.
mclever — I lack the social skills to say this gently, but … you are young. If this comes out looking funny, tell Michael that the edit box is hosed again.
@shortchain
I’m not *that* young. I’m older than Mule Rider, for example…
It’s just that I’m the oldest of my siblings and cousins, and most of my friends IRL are a decade younger than I am, so I end up feeling like the parent whenever they need help with something. (Which has been a lot lately…) It’s nice to be the kid once in a while, even if it’s just with a bunch of old geezers on a blog messageboard.
Could you imagine trying to describe today’s technology and the ease of navigation/communication to yourself of 30 years ago? I mean, we’re talking about before Apple first prototyped Lisa!
Was a late bloomer to the net, but one of the 1st to use ICQ messaging, which was developed by an Israeli Co. mid 90s. Joined an MSN big brother tv reality group late 90s. A small group who capped bb streaming video. The first big broher tv/internet show was Holland 1999. Our small friendly ICQ chat group included one from Holland, Argentina, an Israeli and Canadian. My Argentine buddy, Checho, spoke (6) languages. And yes, I felt like the odd man out.
carry on
>
Except the comment section at Nate’s old blog, unless you happened to save some of the pleasantries!
mclever,
And woe be the n00bz who dared to ask basic questions because they wouldn’t rtfm.
filistro,
This is the problem with humans trying to relate the virtual world to the physical. You’re thinking of this as if it were a closet that fills up.
It’s as if the closets were doubling in capacity every two years. What we need, then, is less electronic algae eaters than better search engine algorithms to help us find what we want. After all, nothing is truly “outdated”. The information may be out of date, but the metainformation (i.e., how did the information look on that particular date) most certainly is not.
shiloh,
And some of that survived, too.
One problem that might happen —
Imagine, today, cleaning out an old attic. You happen to find pictures of your great-grandparents. Maybe handwritten notes over a hundred years old. You clean out that old box, and there your great-great-grandmother is, staring at you from a grainy B&W photograph.
Your great-great-grandchildren will find no such thing. Oh, maybe there are a few hardcopy pictures of you still laying around. But there are likely to be few, if any, of your kids, and none of your grandkids. It’s all going digital. No more boxes of old loveletters. It’s all email.
Okay, nothing on the net ever dies, and if you put all those old .jpgs and .docs on the Cloud, they’ll probably be around forever. But you’re assuming the programs to read .jpgs and .docs will also be around forever.
A lot of the media and a lot of the file formats from twenty years ago can’t be read today. I’ve got novels I wrote on old word processors in the late ‘70s that I can’t read anymore. They’re on 5-inch floppydisks — no hardware to read them — from a word processor that no longer exists. Internet and cloud files will be harder to be inaccessible from a hardware standpoint, but there is no guarantee that MS Word files or .gif graphics or Excel spreadsheets or smtp emails will still be decipherable.
And you certainly won’t find them in a box in the attic.
@Michael
There was a manual? I mean, beyond the command line help?
(If you need help in UNIX, ask the “man”…)
I was definitely one of the n00bz, so I mostly lurked after my nerdier friends and avoided saying anything that would reveal my utter ignorance.
@DC
Good point. It’s a huge assumption to think that the videos, music, books, etc. that we download onto our Kindles and iPhones will even be readable by the technology of ten years from now. I’ve got a whole box of PS2 games that can’t be played anymore…
However, the advantage I see with digital media, is that it’s usually easier to upgrade/convert to the new media format. Five years from now, I might be using a totally new gadget to play my mp3s, but I can probably copy them over via an intermediary technology. And, if mp3s no longer work, there are plenty of audio conversion apps out there that can translate them to the new format. Certainly much easier than copying all of my old cassette tapes onto CD ever was!
The trick is to keep up with it, or the files quickly become obsolete… Hence, no more attic discoveries…
mclever,
Aside from the “man” in UNIX, there also were always those FAQs. Just the FAQs, ma’am.
My dad borrowed an 8mm movie camera in the mid 50s and filmed about 25 minutes of family gatherings. I converted it to VHS in the early 80s and to DVD in the late 90s. Time … marches on.
Speaking of internet privacy re: Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, etc. Never mind! lol
I think I had the (relatively) unique experience of growing up with computers around in the house, but they were bad computers — I remember our old Apple II, with its two 3″ floppy disk drives. The ones at school were ancient and worse, with their ridiculous 5″ (literally) floppy disks and green and black CRT displays. And my parents did a substantial amount of work on punch-card machines in the ‘70s. Kids nowadays are so spoiled with their touchscreen iStuff and XBoxes with awesome graphics and terabyte hard-drives.
Rebooting from Windows 3.1 into MS-DOS so you could run games that would inexplicably crash when you tried to open them in Windows… those were the days. dir/p lolz.
@mclever,
Absolutely true. And the stuff that everyone today agrees is important will undoubtedly get converted.
I’m more concerted with the personal files, your pictures of your grandkids. Two hundred years from now, after the file formats have changed a few dozen times, will there still be converters that can handle things that haven’t been looked at in a century?
We are producing more documentation now than humanity has ever produced. Much of the really vital stuff might be unreadable to historians. You’d think things about government officials would mater (and yes, that stuff does, and yes, it will undoubtedly be preserved and converted). But the facts about everyday life — that will probably mostly vanish, as it always has, even though there is an unprecedented amount of information about it available.
Whereas I didn’t start using the net until the mid 90s, my 1st experience w/computers was 1981 going to USN computer school ie training on AN/UYK-20, AN/UYK-7 computers. The display monitors were Hughes Aircraft.
My govt. office job early 90s was memorable
for replacing the Intel 386sx processor chip pc’s w/486sx chip pc’s. And of course moving from a b/w monitor to color.
Armchair,
Um…yeah…I remember when those were new. I remember eight–inch floppies. And PDP-11s with core memory. And the days before Windows 1.0. You’re a pup.
And my phone is more powerful than the desktop computer I had a decade ago. More memory, more storage, a faster connection to the Internet, and a screen with the same resolution (albeit at a much smaller form factor). It’s mind-blowing at times to consider.
DC,
For the more popular formats, absolutely. There will be a market for it. For example, MP3, JPG, DOC, etc. are so popular they will necessarily have a market. WordStar, though? AmiPro? Not so much.
Northstar’s with dual floppy drives running CPM
Right now, the older formats are pretty easy to decipher. “strings — [filename]” and you get the text. The formatting information is lost, of course, but you get the basic information.
Newer formats, like the later Microsoft ones, with their weird and largely undocumented internal structure, proprietary compression scheme — those are going to be difficult. Luckily, not much of lasting importance is written in those formats.
Remember: save anything important as PDF or some other publicly documented format!
Mike,
Forgive me for not being a geezer.
Armchair,
You kids get off my lawn!
Mike,
You know I’m gonna toilet-paper your tree later, right?
Well, young folk tp’ing a house means at the very least, they have respect for tradition, eh.
Plus if your house was tp’d, it usually meant you were popular.
wait wait, someone is going to Tea Party a house???