AFP Photo / Emmanuel Dunand
Members of the United Nation’s International Telecommunications
Union (ITU) have agreed to work towards implementing a standard for the
Internet that would allow for eavesdropping on a worldwide scale.
At a conference in Dubai this week, the ITU members decided to adopt
the Y.2770 standard for deep packet inspection, a top-secret proposal by
way of China that will allow telecom companies across the world to more
easily dig through data passed across the Web.
According to the
UN, implementing deep-packet inspection, or DPI, on such a global scale
will allow authorities to more easily detect the transferring and
sharing of copyrighted materials and other protected files by finding a
way for administrators to analyze the payload of online transmissions,
not just the header data that is normally identified and interpreted.
“It
is standard procedure to route packets based on their headers, after
all it is the part of the packet that contains information on the
packet's intended destination,” writes The Inquirer’s Lawrence Lati,
“but
by inspecting the contents of each packet ISPs, governments and anyone
else can look at sensitive data. While users can mitigate risks by
encrypting data, given enough resources encryption can be foiled.”
Tim
Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist widely regarded as the
‘Father of the Internet,’ spoke out against proposed DPI implementation
on such a grandiose scale during an address earlier this year at the
World Wide Web Consortium.
"Somebody clamps a deep packet
inspection thing on your cable which reads every packet and reassembles
the web pages, cataloguing them against your name, address and telephone
number either to be given to the government when they ask for it or to
be sold to the highest bidder – that's a really serious breach of
privacy,” he said.
Blogger Arthur Herman writes this week for Fox News online that the goal of the delegates at the ITU “
is to grab control of the World Wide Web away from the United States, and hand it to a UN body of bureaucrats.”
“It’ll be the biggest power grab in the UN’s history, as well as a perversion of its power,” he warns.
The
ITU’s secretary general, Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, has dismissed critics
who have called the proposed DPI model invasive, penning an op-ed this
week where he insists his organization’s meeting in Dubai poses “
no threat to free speech.”
“It
is our chance to chart a globally-agreed roadmap to connect the
unconnected, while ensuring there is investment to create the
infrastructure needed for the exponential growth in voice, video and
data traffic,” Dr. Toure claims of the conference, adding that it presents the UN with
“a
golden opportunity to provide affordable connectivity for all,
including the billions of people worldwide who cannot yet go online.”
Despite
his explanation, though, some nation-states and big-name businesses
remain opposed to the proposal. The ITU’s conference this week has been
held behind closed doors, and representatives with online service
providers Google, Facebook and Twitter have been barred from attending.
In
a report published this week by CNet, tech journalist Declan McCullagh
cites a Korean document that describes the confidential Y.2770 standard
as being able to identify
"embedded digital watermarks in MP3 data," discover
"copyright protected audio content," find "
Jabber messages with Spanish text," or
"identify uploading BitTorrent users."
On
Wednesday, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed a Senate
resolution that asks for the American government to oppose any efforts
by the United Nations to control the Internet.
http://rt.com/usa/news/un-internet-itu-packet-385/
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