can the internet be tamed?

In the US we have seen a concerted effort to control information passing over the internet by targeting individuals, sites and ISPs but so long as there is an independent ISP or satellite uplink or even a land line to another jurisdiction's ISP the traffic can still flow.

The internet model was designed by the Rand Corp at the request of US military at height of cold war.  It heals itself and does not suffer from the amputation of networks from its core.  Its purpose was to be able to communicate at all costs and that is what it does.

Confidentiality of internet traffic came late to the party as early exploitation was by free thinking academics rather than the military.  PGP was at the forefront of bringing internet privacy to the masses.  It raised awareness that data sent across the internet ended up all over the place very quickly.  Site to site security was provided by weak SSL (at the insistence of various governments) and personal privacy by a variety of freeware encryption solutions.

At this point we have a network in which all the data between the user and the intended destination can be encrypted so it would be impossible to filter the good from bad traffic.  In fact from the generators of bad traffic's point of view the more people who encrypt the better since it reduces the profile of their encrypted traffic.  Government threats to subpoena ISP data and to run keyword filters makes people like me who did not encrypt anything other than financial information wonder if I should simply encrypt everything to protect myself from those who might steal my personal data.

I am not of the view that all traffic on the internet is benign and agree that it would be good to find some way to stop criminals communicating freely from one internet cafe to another but I am just saying it is already very hard and will get harder.  The best you can do is try to shut down hubs where illegal material is stored.  Of course bouncing an internet connection around the world makes it hard to know where the "hub" is and with the birth of cloud computing it might not be anywhere physically and even if it is found the data will almost certainly be encrypted.

So long as encryption is used on the internet the option of filtering by content is ruled out so that leaves banning Non Government Organisations from using encryption so the filters generate a hit if the traffic contains the keywords or cannot be interpreted into the language of the country using the filter.  This approach is used to stop outgoing and incoming encrypted material across corporate firewalls but these are tiny islands in a vast sea of interconnections.  Adopting the banning of SSL and content encryption across a whole country would render the internet unusable commercially.

We have a dilemma.  The same internet technology can be used for good or bad so stopping the bad stops the good too.  The introduction of cheap disposable mobile phones had a similar impact on the analysis of voice traffic.  When necessary all mobile voice traffic is jammed until the situation is under control but you can only do that if you know where the problem is so internet control is all or nothing.  Switch off all the trunk routes for voice, internet and satellite communications into and out of the country. Then what?

The main lesson to be learned from wikigate is that classified information should not be aggregated on machines connected to a wide area network and that the data should all be encrypted in any case.  The difficulty of containing unwanted data flow once it has escaped is not feasible without damaging legitimate use of the internet.  There are also lessons to be learned about vetting personnel who might abuse their privileges.  This is not news but it is a wake-up call that systems handling classified data need better technical controls and much better physical and personnel controls.  In a war zone that's hard so the response should be to make only essential information accessible from access points in hostile environments.

The other kind of poisonous traffic is that relating to the planning of major criminal activities.  This will have to be handled the old fashioned way by investigation and analysis of behaviour of suspects and then gathering evidence by observing activity rather than electronic surveillance.

My conclusion is that the internet can be killed at an enormous cost to society but not manipulated to serve only one master so no it cannot be tamed.