Explanation of the Disad 2

Nationalization Avoids Attacks

Russia wants control for national security purposes – avoids attacks

[Alexey Eremenko, Russia Wants State Control of Root Internet Infrastructure, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/russia-wants-state-control-of-root-internet-infrastructure/509989.html]

The global push is likely to fizzle out, industry experts said — but at home, the plan has every chance of succeeding.

Backers of the Kremlin line say bigger state control of the Internet is mandatory for national security, hinting that the U.S. could disconnect Russia from the Web.

But critics say that Russia, which already censors the Internet, simply wants to expand its means of political censorship.

"Russia wants state control of the global network … instead of public control," said Artem Kozlyuk, a freedom of information activist with Rublacklist.net, an independent Internet freedom watchdog.

The latest wave-generating proposal came from Russian Communications and Mass Media Minister Nikolai Nikiforov, who urged the launch of a reform at the United Nations to give control of the Internet to national governments.

Government Domain

Nikiforov's proposal comes hot on the heels of the Kremlin's attempt to take over the domestic system of domain name assignment, currently overseen by the non-profit organization Coordination Center for TLD RU.

The government wants the Coordination Center's job transferred to a state agency, several prominent media outlets, including business daily Vedomosti, said last month.

The issue was discussed at the now-famous Security Council meeting of Oct. 1, when top Russian officials reportedly gathered to discuss the possibility of Russia's disconnection from the Internet.

Nikiforov said last month that it was only contingency planning in case Russia's Western opponents pull the plug, possibly as further sanctions for Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March.

However, Kozlyuk of Rublacklist.net said that so far, most cases of a country going off the grid were the work of domestic governments trying to suppress dissent, such as — most famously — Egypt in 2011 during the Arab Spring.

The proposal for a takeover of the Coordination Center has been stalled, but the government could follow through with it at any time simply by pushing the group to amend its charter to recognize state superiority, said Ilya Massukh, head of the state-affiliated Information Democracy Foundation.

ICANN vs. Autocrats

The key role in managing the global Internet is currently played by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees domain name assignment throughout the world.

ICANN is a California-based non-profit organization that operates under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The U.S. role in Internet policing has caused much grumbling in recent years as the Internet has spread across the globe, and prompted calls to move to a so-called "multi-stakeholder governance model" that would give other players a greater say in managing the World Wide Web.

Russia had previously staged a campaign to give root control of the Internet to the UN at an earlier International Telecommunications Union conference in Dubai in 2012.

Its proposal gathered a handful of backers at the time — mostly authoritarian countries such as China, Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia — but was torpedoed by Western powers.

But this time, China withdrew its support, which makes Nikiforov's initiative even less likely to succeed, said Karen Kazaryan, chief analyst for the lobby group the Russian Association of Electronic Communications.

"China has a working censorship system, and it is not going to antagonize the world, and the other backers don't have enough geopolitical clout to push it through," Kazaryan said by telephone Wednesday.

Kozlyuk of Rublacklist.net claimed that Russia was courting European Parliament members for lobbying support. The claim could not be independently verified.

RuNet Regulated

President Vladimir Putin famously pledged to leave the Internet alone at a meeting with industry representatives at his ascension to the Kremlin in 2000.

Free from state intervention, the Russian segment of the Internet — the RuNet — blossomed, now counting 58 million daily users in Russia, according to the state-run Public Opinion Foundation, and spawning highly successful companies such as Yandex and Mail.ru.

But things began to change in late 2011, when Russian netizens, many of them educated young urbanites, became the driving force of record anti-Putin protests.

Since then, the government has been so busy imposing new regulations that it is now routinely accused of building the "Great Russian Firewall" of censorship.

The state now has the power to blacklist websites without court order for a variety of reasons, including political ones.

Separate legislation ramps up state control over popular blogs and online news aggregators, making it easier to shut down any of them.

And another Kremlin-penned law under review in the State Duma would oblige most organizations handling the personal data of Russians — including the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Booking.com — to store them solely on Russia-based servers, easily accessible to secret services.

Bureaucrats and Utopias

Russia is not unique in its push to give control of the Internet to traditional bureaucratic structures, said Massukh, a former deputy communications minister.

Gov’t Control Prevents Attacks

Government control over the internet key to prevent and mitigate cyber disasters

Baldor, AP writer, 09

[Lolita C. Baldor, How much government control in cybercrisis?, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/33038143/ns/technology_and_science-security/t/how-much-government-control-cybercrisis/#.VWXbAvlViko]

There's no kill switch for the Internet, no secret on-off button in an Oval Office drawer.

Yet when a Senate committee was exploring ways to secure computer networks, a provision to give the president the power to shut down Internet traffic to compromised Web sites in an emergency set off alarms.

Corporate leaders and privacy advocates quickly objected, saying the government must not seize control of the Internet.

Lawmakers dropped it, but the debate rages on. How much control should federal authorities have over the Web in a crisis? How much should be left to the private sector? It does own and operate at least 80 percent of the Internet and argues it can do a better job.

"We need to prepare for that digital disaster," said Melissa Hathaway, the former White House cybersecurity adviser. "We need a system to identify, isolate and respond to cyberattacks at the speed of light."

So far at least 18 bills have been introduced as Congress works carefully to give federal authorities the power to protect the country in the event of a massive cyberattack. Lawmakers do not want to violate personal and corporate privacy or squelching innovation. All involved acknowledge it isn't going to be easy.

For most people, the Internet is a public haven for free thought and enterprise. Over time it has become the electronic control panel for much of the world's critical infrastructure. Computer networks today hold government secrets, military weapons specifications, sensitive corporate data, and vast amounts of personal information.

Millions of times a day, hackers, cybercriminals and mercenaries working for governments and private entities are scanning those networks, looking to defraud, disrupt or even destroy.

Just eight years ago, the government ordered planes from the sky in the hours after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Could or should the president have the same power over the Internet in a digital disaster?

If hackers take over a nuclear plant's control system, should the president order the computer networks shut down? If there's a terrorist attack, should the government knock users off other computer networks to ensure that critical systems stay online? And should the government be able to dictate who companies can hire and what they must do to secure the networks that affect Americans' daily life.

Answer To – “internet good”

Nationalization doesn’t “end the Internet.”

Gordon M. Goldstein, 6/25/2014. Served as a member of the American delegation to the World Conference on International Telecommunications. “The End of the Internet?” The Atlantic, http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/07/the-end-of-the-internet/372301/.
Some experts anticipate a future with a Brazilian Internet, a European Internet, an Iranian Internet, an Egyptian Internet—all with different content regulations and trade rules, and perhaps with contrasting standards and operational protocols. Eli Noam, a professor of economics and finance at Columbia Business School, believes that such a progressive fracturing of the global Internet is inevitable. “We must get used to the idea that the standardised internet is the past but not the future,” he wrote last fall. “And that the future is a federated internet, not a uniform one.” Noam thinks that can be managed, in part through the development of new intermediary technologies that would essentially allow the different Internets to talk to each other, and allow users to navigate the different legal and regulatory environments.

Chinese Control Good

Chinese control key to security

CNN 12 – 30 – 14

[The Great Firewall of China is nearly complete, http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/30/technology/china-internet-firewall-google/]

For U.S. companies hoping to do business in the world's second largest economy, Beijing's approach presents a series of tough choices.

Companies that resist Beijing's censorship -- as Google has done -- are often punished as a result. Of major U.S. social media platforms, only LinkedIn (LNKD, Tech30) has been allowed to operate in China -- and only after it agreed to block content. For example, it took down posts earlier this year related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

China is unlikely to ease its restrictions in the near-term. Beijing often describes what is known colloquially as the "Great Firewall" as a critical national security tool.

"I can choose who will be a guest in my home," China's top Internet regulator Lu Wei said earlier this year.

The nationalist-leaning Global Times offered the security justification in an editorial published Tuesday.

"If the China side indeed blocked Gmail, the decision must have been prompted by newly emerged security reasons," the paper said. "If that is the case, Gmail users need to accept the reality of Gmail being suspended in China."

Russian Control Good

Russia is nationalizing to control in the case of emergency

New York Times 10 – 1 – 14

[Putin Supports Project to ‘Secure’ Russia Internet, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/world/europe/russia-vladimir-putin-internet.html?_r=0]

President Vladimir V. Putin appeared on Wednesday to throw his support behind a plan to isolate the Internet in Russia from the rest of the World Wide Web, but said the Russian government was “not even considering” censoring Internet sites.

In a speech to the Russian National Security Council, Mr. Putin said the plan was intended to build a backup system to keep websites in the Russian domains — those ending in .ru and .rf — online in a national emergency.

Mr. Putin said other countries had taken to using the Internet “for not only economic, but military and political goals” and said information security was a priority for the country.

The Russian news media has labeled the plan, some details of which were reported last month by Vedomosti, a Russian daily, a “kill switch” for the Internet, or Russia’s answer to the “Great Firewall” put up by the Chinese.

President Vladimir V. Putin has moved to prop up Bank Rossiya, owned by close friends, in the face of Western sanctions.Putin’s Way: Private Bank Fuels Fortunes of Putin’s Inner CircleSEPT. 27, 2014

“It’s important to secure the Russian segment of the Internet,” Mr. Putin said, according to a transcript posted on the Kremlin website. “We do not intend to limit access to the Internet, to put it under total control, to nationalize the Internet.

“We need to greatly improve the security of domestic communications networks and information resources, primarily those used by state structures,” he added.

The Russian goals appear for now distinct from those of the Chinese, experts on Internet policy say, and inspired partly by a revelation this summer in Wired magazine by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, who lives in Moscow, that United States government hackers inadvertently crashed the Syrian web in 2012.

Russia has recently promulgated policies to censor the Internet through laws banning extremist content and requiring social networking and financial companies to base their data servers in Russia. The goal of the new system, however, appears not to block foreign content, but rather to keep Russia’s own news and information machine online in times of crisis.

Oleg Demidov, an authority on Russian Internet policies at the PIR center in Moscow, said that Russia wanted to create a “double channel” for the Internet. The backup channel would of course be under government control.

“In normal times, it would work like it does now,” he said of this Russian vision of the Internet. “But in an emergency, the reserve system would come alive.”

Nationalized internet is a fight between the US and Russia

Daily Mail 6 – 22 – 12

[Eddie Wrenn, The battle for internet freedom: Russia tells U.N. during secret talks that it wants to be able to censor the web to repress political opposition, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2163165/The-battle-internet-freedom-Russia-tells-U-N-wants-able-censor-web-repress-political-opposition.html]

Russia wants the ability to censor the internet - but the U.S. plans to stonewall the plans at a U.N. conference later this year.

Russia says it wants the right to block access where it is used for 'interfering in the internal affairs, or undermining the sovereignty, national security, territorial integrity and public safety of other states, or to divulge information of a sensitive nature'.

The member nations of the United Nations will gather this December to create a treaty for the World Conference on International Telecommunications - and Russia has already made it clear which way it wants the internet to develop.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has long called for a centralised control of the internet.

The U.S. delegation has vowed to block any proposals from Russia and other countries that they believe threaten the internet's current governing structure or give tacit approval to online censorship.

But those assurances have failed to ease fears that bureaucratic tinkering with the treaty could damage the world's most powerful engine for exchanging information, creating jobs and even launching revolutions.

Examples of where the internet has acted as a voice for change include when social networks played a key role in the Arab Spring uprisings that last year upended regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.

The wording of Russia's provision for the treaty allow a country to repress political opposition while citing a U.N. treaty as the basis for doing so.

Fixes Privacy Issues – Facebook

Nationalizing fixes the problems with facebook – solves privacy concerns

Howard, professor of communication, information, and international studies at the University of Washington, 2012

[Philip N. Howard, Let’s Nationalize Facebook, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/08/facebook_should_be_nationalized_to_protect_user_rights_.single.html]

Over the last several years, Facebook has become a public good and an important social resource. But as a company, it is behaving badly, and long term, that may cost it: A spring survey found that almost half of Americans believe that Facebook will eventually fade away. Even the business side has been a bit of a disaster lately, with earnings lower than expected and the news that a significant portion of Facebook profiles are fake. If neither users nor investors can be confident in the company, it’s time we start discussing an idea that might seem crazy: nationalizing Facebook.

By “nationalizing Facebook,” I mean public ownership and at least a majority share at first. When nationalizing the company restores the public trust, that controlling interest could be reduced. There are three very good reasons for this drastic step: It could fix the company’s woeful privacy practices, allow the social network to fulfill its true potential for providing social good, and force it to put its valuable data to work on significant social problems.

Let’s start with privacy. Right now, the company violates everybody’s privacy expectations, not to mention privacy laws. It also struggles to respond properly to regulatory requests in different countries. In part, this is because its services are designed to meet the bare minimum of legal expectations in each jurisdiction. When users in Europe request copies of the data Facebook keeps on them, they are sent huge volumes of records. But not every user lives in a jurisdiction that requires such responsiveness from Facebook—U.S. users are out of luck because their regulators don’t ask as many questions as those in the European Union and Canada. Privacy watchdogs consistently complain that the company uses user data in ways they didn't agree to or anticipate. There are suspicions that the company creates shadow profiles of people who aren’t even users but whose names get mentioned by people who are Facebook users.

Few of us fully understand Facebook’s privacy policy, much less keep track of changes. People are sharing more personal information on Facebook than they think they are. And for every dozen Facebook users in the United States, one does not use privacy settings—either because that person doesn’t care or doesn’t know enough about how the privacy settings can be used. True, Facebook recently provided an opportunity for users to vote on changes to the interface. But the program seemed more like a gimmick designed to placate the most opinionated and tech-savvy users: It was not heavily promoted and not a serious effort to educate the public and survey opinion. Indeed, few people voted.

It would be better to have a national privacy commissioner with real authority, some stringent privacy standards set at the federal level, and programs for making good use of some of the socially valuable data mining that firms like Facebook do. But in the United States, such sweeping innovations are probably too difficult to actually pull off, and nationalization would almost get us there. Facebook would have to rise to First Amendment standards rather than their own terms of service. The company could be regulated the way public utilities often are.

With 80 percent of market share, Facebook is already a monopoly, and being publicly traded hasn’t made it more socially responsible. The map of its global market dominance is impressive, though some might say this is a map of colonization. In its recent SEC filing, Facebook declared its goal of connecting all Internet users. The company actually wants to be public information infrastructure, and to that end its tools have been used for a lot of good, like encouraging organ donations and helping activists build social movements in countries run by tough dictators.

But Facebook can also make mistakes with political consequences. The company has come under fire for missteps like prohibiting photos of women breast-feeding and suddenly banning “Palestinian” pages at one point. Facebook communications are an important tool for democracy advocates, including those who helped organize the Arab Spring. Yet the user policy of requiring that democratic activists in authoritarian regimes maintain “real” profiles puts activist leaders at risk. And dictators have figured out how they can use Facebook to monitor activist networks and entrap democracy advocates.

But since the security services in Syria, Iran, and China now use Facebook to monitor and entrap activists, public trust in Facebook may be misplaced. Rather than allow Facebook to serve authoritarian interests, if nationalized in the United States, we could make Facebook change its identity policy to allow democracy activists living in dictatorships to use pseudonyms.

Prevents Uprisings

Nationalizing the internet prevents populist uprisings

Ray, Security Analyst at 21CT, 2014

[Tim ray, The Balkanization of the Internet, http://www.21ct.com/blog/the-revolution-will-not-be-tweeted-the-balkanization-of-the-internet-part-2/]

The string of uprisings in Eastern Europe and Asia beginning in 2010 that came to be known as the Arab Spring was a defining moment for social media. Suddenly Twitter was much more than a fad. It was a communication method for the downtrodden. Anonymous service providers were the lifeblood of the movement. Tor-bridged connections were essential to the early organization and success enjoyed by the youth of the Arab Spring.

This success caused government entities to take notice. Egypt, for instance, turned off their connections to the Internet (as much as they could anyway). That lasted as long as business didn’t complain, then it was turned back on. Other regimes turned frantically to their intelligence services and attempted to lure and honeypot the radical elements of society with varying degrees of success. Mostly, they began to plan what to do against future eventualities.

As a leader in one of these tumultuous nations what would you do? Without getting into the moral or ethical questions involved (it’s enough to ask the technical questions for now) let’s role-play for a bit. You’re Minister in charge of the Information Directorate in an emerging economic nation. Your country has weathered a popular uprising, and some changes were made, promises of elections, and so forth. The radical elements are appeased enough (for now), but it would only take one charismatic firebrand to boil it over again. You need to allow your country’s economy to grow, keeping your population employed (and thus off the streets) while at the same time keeping an eye on the fringe elements of your world, who are even now planning their next wave of protests. It’s a tough problem, and it’s a life or death one in some parts of the world.

You grudgingly admit that you need to give the people access to the Internet. It’s the single largest facilitator of small business and innovation for your growing economy. The people also expect privacy. Yet, at the same time, privacy is where the radicals hide. They use encryption tech to keep plans secret, and your intelligence resources can’t keep up. You need to bring all essential Internet services ‘in house’ somehow.

Your best course of action is to force all your Internet traffic through one choke point, and watch that very carefully. Make sure you have good pipes to your major trading partners, and make sure you can man-in-the-middle all encrypted traffic. That means no more private security certs; the State holds them all. It will likely mean ID coded transmission of information, where a user’s ID is appended to everything they do online. This would essentially eliminate the possibility of maintaining anonymity (and thus privacy) online and hiding activity from the State.

So your ministerial proposal looks pretty good:

Nationalize your citizens’ data, (which looks good to the populace as we’re seeing with Brazil’s efforts describe below)

A single firewall for your country for efficient monitoring of Internet traffic

The state owns the infrastructure, so there’s no expectation of privacy, the same as for a business or office (that’s the legal tool to get control of the certificates)

The best part: it’s not that expensive. In fact, centralizing everything like that would give your country great bargaining power with the undersea cable networks and other global entities.

This scenario of nationalizing their bit of the Internet could be quite compelling to policy makers in response to the fear of a popular revolt.

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