The issue with balancing privacy and surveillance is that the wireless carriers are not interested in privacy, he said. "They've been providing wiretapping for 100 years. Apple may in the next year protect voice calls," he said, and said that the best hope for ending widespread government surveillance will be the makers of mobile operating systems like Apple and Google.
Not all upcoming security innovation will be focused on that kind of privacy protection. Security researcher Brandon Wiley showed off at Defcon a protocol he calls Dust that can obfuscate different kinds of network traffic, with the end goal of preventing censorship.
"I only make products about letting you say what you want to say anywhere in the world," such as content critical of governments, he said. Encryption can hide the specifics of the traffic, but some governments have figured out that they can simply block all encrypted traffic, he said. The Dust protocol would change that, he said, making it hard to tell the difference between encrypted and unencrypted traffic.
It's hard to build encryption into pre-existing products, Wiley said. "I think people are going to make easy-to-use, encrypted apps, and that's going to be the future."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 24 Apr 14by Jérémie Zimmermann For almost 15 years, "Internet Governance" meetings1 have been drawing attention and driving our imaginaries towards believing that consensual rules for the Internet could emerge from global "multi-stakeholder" discussions. A few days ahead of the "NETmundial" Forum in Sao Paulo it has become obvious that "Internet Governance" is a farcical way of keeping us busy and hiding a sad reality: Nothing concrete in these 15 years, not a single action, ever emerged from "multi-stakeholder" meetings, while at the same time, technology as a whole has been turned against its users, as a tool for surveillance, control and oppression.
