Continued from "Captives of the Cloud, Part II"
A Massive, Expanding Surveillance State With Unlimited Power And No Accountability Will Secure Our Freedom by Hans Christian Andersen.
—twitter.com/pourmecoffeeViolence arms itself with the inventions of Art and Science in order to contend against violence.
—Carl von ClausewitzInfrastructure is the technology that determines whether we live or die. Your infrastructure will kill you—if it fails, you fail.
—Smári McCarthy
The internet began as a place too complicated for nation-states to understand; it ended up, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as a place only nation-states seem to understand. This has left omnipresent cloud giants Google and Yahoo!, in their own words, “outraged.” They are helpless bystanders to US spy agencies as they extraterritorially, without permission, and aided by the Brits, break into data center cables just to find out if the next Bin Laden is out there posting kitten videos on YouTube. In response, Germany and Switzerland cash in on “secure” clouds; Russia fortifies its digital walls, incarcerates Pussy Riot, and offers asylum to Edward Snowden. Ecuador, which hosts Julian Assange in its London Embassy as a political refugee, is to rebrand itself as a “haven for internet freedom.” These recent developments show the deep divide between the perspectives of various governments often claiming to restore national sovereignty over data space, and the very nature of the network itself, which is by definition transnational and borderless.
Read the full article here.