Re: Bruce Schneier's Proposal to dedicate November meeting to saving the Internet from the NSA

[Adam Novak <[e-mail]>]

On 09/05/2013 08:19 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Tell me what the IETF could be doing that it isn't already doing.
>
> I'm not talking about what implementors and operators and users should
> be doing; still less about what legislators should or shouldn't be
> doing. I care about all those things, but the question here is what
> standards or informational outputs from the IETF are needed, in addition
> to what's already done or in the works.
>
> I don't intend that to be a rhetorical question.
>
>       Brian

One way to frustrate this sort of dragnet surveillance would be to 
reduce centralization in the Internet's architecture. Right now, the way 
the Internet works in practice for private individuals, all your traffic 
goes up one pipe to your ISP. It's trivial to tap, since the tapping can 
be centralized at the ISP end.

The IETF focused on developing protocols (and reserving the necessary 
network numbers) to facilitate direct network peering between private 
individuals, it could make it much more expensive to mount large-scale 
traffic interception attacks.