IETF declares war onsurveillance

The Internet Engineering Task Force has published RFC 7258, which is a bombshell whose title is: "Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack." It represents the outcome of a long argument about whether the Internet's technical architecture should take active countermeasures to fight mass surveillance, which Tim Bray summarizes. I especially like his rejoinder to people who argue against this because there are places where it's legitimate to monitor communications, like prisons: "We don't want an Internet optimized for prisons." Read the rest