Earlier this year I wrote about wide open networks which are really just networks without firewalls where the security is handled at a device level and where all traffic between all devices is encrypted.
Well it looks like a bunch of paranoid americans together with a whole bunch of software pirates might just take this one step closer to reality sooner rather than later.
HOWTO protect your online privacy now that the Senate repealed the Fourth Amendment?
Isn’t that a great title for a blog post?
Well over at Boingboing this discussion is heating up
One of the big suggestions is how you should encrypt all your traffic and encrypt your hard drive. Sure they are missing a lot of points ranging from how securing the transport of your mail using say TLS is of no use if it then sits on your ISPs mail server in clear text through to why would anybody want to see pictures of your granny anyway but there is clearly a desire from ordinary web citizens to protect themselves from whatever threats are out there and they see encryption as the way to do it.
And of course being american, you just know the security that ends up being put in place will be way way way over the top but it doesn’t matter because that is clearly the american way 
But then you get the pirates.
The guys over at pirate bay have realised that if you encrypt your illegal downloads, nobody can actually see what you are downloading and therefore nobody can actually prove if you are downloading legal or illegal material.
So Pirate Bay are working flat out to develop a transport level encryption service that will encrypt all traffic to and from your PC. So just like in the early days of the Internet where it was the porn industry that drove a lot of the technologies we take for granted today, again it’s the bad guys who are driving the technology.
See Pirate Bay Wants To Encrypt The Entire Internet
Is this a good thing then?
For the reasons given, no but the technology will be to the good of all Internet users at some point so whilst we might not like it today, we will find the silver lining to all of this soon.
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