The BRICS nations (e.g. Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are considering building their own Web network using their own cables so they can make themselves immune to NSA spying. As their international infrastructure builds out it will be relatively-easy for other countries to join it too. Web traffic in a country all goes through a certain number of 'repeater' locations to route it wherever it is supposed to go. Cutting a country over to an alternative Web requires change at the level of the 'repeater' sites but no change at all is needed at lower levels.
It's likely the NSA would respond by trying to penetrate the network such that it could infect servers and systems much as it is said to have done with an Iranian nuclear reactor. It is said the reactor software was compromised and the result was a change in the software such that the reactor destroyed itself.
It would be a formidable challenge to keep NSA software out of any new network but the biggest damage would be at the user level in removing entire countries from access to varying parts of the world. Where the World Wide Web was predicated on openness and sharing, the NSA has turned it into a world of secrecy and theft. The destruction already wreaked by this will be incredibly difficult to reverse as trust once lost can sometimes never be recovered.
Obama has said he is considering restraints on the NSA but this doesn't mean anything as he has already lied so many times about what the NSA is doing as have representatives of the American security pyramid. There's little chance Obama would be believed and there is little reason he should be believed. Having created the nightmare, there's little or nothing that can be done to control it. Unlike nuclear systems which can be physically-inspected, there is nothing to be seen in network surveillance and any restraint in capability could be rolled back out of the systems as soon as the inspectors have gone.
It's likely the NSA would respond by trying to penetrate the network such that it could infect servers and systems much as it is said to have done with an Iranian nuclear reactor. It is said the reactor software was compromised and the result was a change in the software such that the reactor destroyed itself.
It would be a formidable challenge to keep NSA software out of any new network but the biggest damage would be at the user level in removing entire countries from access to varying parts of the world. Where the World Wide Web was predicated on openness and sharing, the NSA has turned it into a world of secrecy and theft. The destruction already wreaked by this will be incredibly difficult to reverse as trust once lost can sometimes never be recovered.
Obama has said he is considering restraints on the NSA but this doesn't mean anything as he has already lied so many times about what the NSA is doing as have representatives of the American security pyramid. There's little chance Obama would be believed and there is little reason he should be believed. Having created the nightmare, there's little or nothing that can be done to control it. Unlike nuclear systems which can be physically-inspected, there is nothing to be seen in network surveillance and any restraint in capability could be rolled back out of the systems as soon as the inspectors have gone.
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