On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 6:59 AM, John Young <jya@pipeline.com> wrote:

Snowden may have raised the prospect of comsec as a public utility like power, water, gas, sewage, air quality, environmental protection and telecommunications...

Comsec as a right for human discourse rather than a commercial service could enforce privacy beyond easy violation for official and commercial purposes...

The problem will be as ever the commercial and governmental exploiters aiming to protect their interests against that of the public.

i suggest changing the balance of power in favor of the public. four distinct efforts would do: 1) Blanket Legal Invulnerability Remove all criminal and civil liability for "hacking", computer trespass, and all related activities performed over data networks; establish proactive "shield" legislation to protect and encourage unrestricted security research of any subject on any network. extend to international agreements for blanket protection in all jurisdictions. 2) Educational Support Everywhere Establish lock picking, computing, and hacking curriculum in pre school through grade school with subsidized access to technical resources including mobile, tablet, laptop test equipment, grid/cloud computing on-demand, software defined radios with full receive/transmit, and gigabit internet service or faster. 3) Collaborative Competitions Organize a program of blue and red teaming challenges for educational and public participation at the district, regional, and national level cultivating expertise and rewarding it with hacking toys, access, and monies. 4) Privileged Positioning Direct and unrestricted backbone access to various individuals or groups who demonstrate competence in either the educational or competitive realms, in order for them to mount additional attack strategies against any reach-able target. this access must consist of both passive taps of backbone traffic as well as injection taps for raw packet transmission at core rates. this should be available on the Internet backbone at internet exchanges, private fiber through public right of way, and core networks of operators of licensed wireless spectrum. 0) end result / strong attractor: Open software and hardware widely in use in post-privacy-protection-purge future will invert power structure to defender with near unassailable advantage in "cyber domain". Any attacker required to compete against the global, collaborative, massive, iterative-crowd-hardened systems publicly in use. (good luck!)