The war between the tech industry and the NSA is only beginning. A battle of freedom and censorship; between privacy and surveillance. Our whole lives are online, so we certainly need someone trying to keep the internet the way it is.
Google, Microsoft and other major online powers are trying to keep the NSA from having complete control over internet censorship and information, but what is it we really can do to protect the internet, our information and the internet as we know it?
While John McAfee believes the answer lies behind his very own D-Central (a $100 device that will block the NSA from monitoring you), Google’s Eric Schmidt has a whole other plan.
Eric Schmidt says the best solution is to encrypt everything online. This would be a very complicated project, encrypting every single file and site online can’t be easy. In fact, Eric Schmidt has an approximate window for accomplishing such feat and it won’t be soon.
“We can end government censorship in a decade. The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything.” -Eric Schmidt
A decade is a long time, so you might want to consider McAfee’s box for a while if you really care about NSA privacy. The battle has already started, though. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have started encrypting emails and personal messages in order to keep your conversations and information off NSA eyes.
Of course, the NSA and other organizations can try and decrypt whatever encryption may be used. This won’t be very easy for the government, though, who accepts they won’t be able to decrypt powerful security solutions until 2030. By then, even better encryption could be created by the tech industry.
It will be a long fight, but with such powerful tech companies behind us it’s hard to see the government winning. Like Google’s Eric Schmidt said in the same interview: “It’s always a cat-and-mouse game. In that race, I think the censors will lose and I think the people will be empowered.”
