Sunday, Dec 4, 2011 9:00 AM EST
Twitter takes sides on the Internet’s future
While some tech companies aim to sell surveillance, one aims to
thwart it.
By Nancy Scola <http://www.salon.com/writer/nancy_scola/>
If you’re wondering where Internet and other digital technologies are
headed, take note of two news items from this past week.
The first was a piece in the Washington Post profiling the Wiretappers’
Ball
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trade-in-surveillance-technology-raises-worries/2011/11/22/gIQAFFZOGO_story.html>,
a recent gathering in suburban Maryland for those who make tools for
surveilling, monitoring and throttling the Internet — and for the people
who buy them. The get-together, according to the Post, featured more
than three dozen countries and nearly as many U.S. federal agencies.
It’s a showcase event for an industry in which behemoths like Cisco, and
smaller players like Blue Coat, help control and track the Internet
activities of the government’s enemies in China (Falun Gong) and Syria
(revolutionaries).
The second, smaller development, reported by the Wall Street Journal,
was thatSan Francisco-based Twitter Inc. had acquired Whisper Systems
<http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/11/28/twitter-adds-team-who-created-privacy-tools-for-activists/>,
a two-person firm that specializes in securing the Android mobile
operating system. The firm’s only employees — the marvelously named
Moxie Marlinspike and fellow researcher Stuart Anderson — seek to make
it harder for snoops to monitor who and how) you are texting, calling
and otherwise connecting with digitally.
These seemingly unrelated events represent alternative visions of the
roles technology companies, large and small, will play in the future of
the Internet. Will the Internet remain a healthy, flexible, sustainable
platform for discourse? Or will it turn into yet another medium
controlled by whoever has the most offline power?
[...]
Continua qui:
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/04/the_difference_between_twitter_and_cisco/singleton/
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