Could the NSA be responsible for breaking the internet?

[Mack27]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/brazil-looks-break-us-centric-040621384.html

Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington's widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.

President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company's network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

The leader is so angered by the espionage that on Tuesday she postponed next month's scheduled trip to Washington, where she was to be honored with a state dinner.

Internet security and policy experts say the Brazilian government's reaction to information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is understandable, but warn it could set the Internet on a course of Balkanization.

"The global backlash is only beginning and will get far more severe in coming months," said Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute at the Washington-based New America Foundation think tank. "This notion of national privacy sovereignty is going to be an increasingly salient issue around the globe."

Privacy rights aren't just an American thing and I can see why people all over the world would have a problem with the NSA spying on them. Freedom of information all over the world is potentially threatened by the country that says it wants freedom of information all over the world.

The internet was making the world a smaller place and a freer place. If I was Brazil I might consider abolishing TCP/IP altogether and creating a closed national data network with a completely different protocol. This isn't as hard as you think, the big tech companies all have proprietary protocols that work over the same transmission mediums currently used, they'd be more than happy to customize one for a country to use.

Imagine a world where there are hundreds of completely different and incompatible internets.

If that happens, you can thank the NSA.

 

[gangstadawg]

 

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