Imagine that twenty years after Johannes Gutenberg invented mechanical movable type, the Pope and the petty princes - in fact, anyone who tried hard enough - had the ability to determine exactly who was printing exactly what. Worrying about intellectual property theft, privacy or civil rights violations, had those concepts existed, would be missing the point.
The future of Europe, the future of humanity, would have been profoundly changed, not just for five years but five hundred. If people lost trust in the underlying communication medium, could there even have been a Renaissance or Enlightenment?
Unfortunately, the world is facing this dilemma today as it is possible, even likely, the Internet will not remain as resilient, free, secure, and as awesome, for future generations as it has been for ours. It is under grave threat from data breaches, theft of commercial secrets, the opportunity for widespread disruptive attacks and systemic failures, erection of sovereign borders, and mass surveillance.
The only truly goal for this new cyber strategy should be to give the defenders the high-ground advantage over attackers. This is just imaginable with a clever push for new technology, policy, and practice which is applied patiently, internationally, at scale, and with the private sector at the fore.
This talk will discuss these threats to the Internet and novel approaches to sidestep much of the current unproductive debate over privacy versus security.