2013 The Year Trust Died Online

We had something beautiful. An Internet born of Wild West enthusiasm, fueled by free and unfettered commerce, and just beginning to shape a new world without constraints where sovereign borders meant less and less while human interactions and instantaneous organization meant more and more.

All that died with the revelation from Edward Snowden that in fact the NSA and other intelligence agencies had tapped into the Internet stream to take advantage of an intelligence windfall. The NSA, with a little help from its friends has siphoned off email, texts, phone calls, and geo-location data to spy on practically the whole world. In an unrestrained rush to capture everything it has destroyed everything that made the Internet good.

Where to begin? Apparently the NSA steals data from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, and Skype. It taps the undersea fiber optic cables from which it can derive geolocation data for all cell phone calls. It targets the cell phones and email accounts of world leaders. It infiltrates standards bodies such as NIST and the IETF to subvert crypto standards. It bribes vendors of encryption products to use these corrupt standards.

The fall out has been remarkable. Yes, …