Name: 【TEDx】The Battle for Power on the Internet: Bruce Schneier at TEDxCambridge 2013
Uploaded: 2014-06-16T15:50:13.000Z
Duration: 12 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So we are in the middle of  an epic battle for power in cyberspace.

like governments and large multi-international corporations.

On the other side, think of distributed power,

grassroots movements, dissidents' groups,

Initially, the Internet gave  power to the distributed.

It gave them  coordination and efficiency

Today, traditional powers are back and they're winning big.

What I wanna do here is tell the story of those two powers fighting.

Who wins and how our society survives their battle.

So back in the early days  of the Internet,

there was a lot of talk  about its natural laws.

Censorship was impossible, anonymity was easy,

police were clueless  about cybercrime...

The Internet was fundamentally international

masses empowered, freedom spread throughout the world,

but some of it  did actually come to pass:

political organizing, crowd funding and crowd sourcing...

eBay really did normalize the world's attics.

And Facebook and twitter really did help topple governments.

But that was just one side of the Internet's disruptive character.

It's also made traditional power  more powerful.

there are two trends that are currently feeling this:

means we no longer have  control of our data:

our email, photos, calendar, address book, messages, documents,

they're now on servers belonging to Google, Apple,

And second, we are increasingly accessing our data

using devices that are tightly controlled by vendors.

Think of your iPhone, your iPad, your Android phone,

And even the new computer OSs, Microsoft and Apple,

are heading in this direction, with less user control.

And both of these trends increase corporate power

by giving them more control  of our data and therefore of us.

Government power is also increasing on the Internet.

There's more government surveillance than ever before.

We know now the NSA is eavesdropping on the entire planet.

There's more censorship  than ever before.

More governments are controlling what the users

Totalitarian governments are embracing the Internet as a means for control.

And many countries are pushing cyberwar as a reason of a control.

On both the corporate  and the government side,

traditional power  on the Internet is huge.

And in many cases,  the interests are aligning.

Surveillance is the business model of the Internet,

and business surveillance  gives governments access to data

as a public-private  surveillance partnership.

How in those early Internet years did we get the future so wrong?

The truth is that technology magnifies power in general,

The distributed can make use of new technologies faster.

They're small but nimble, they're not hindered by bureaucracy,

and some of these are not by laws or ethics,

And when those groups  discovered the Internet,

Can you remember,  as soon as the Internet

a new bread of cyber criminal  emerged, like out of the ground,

And the police who are like trained on Agatha Christie novels

immediately use  the Internet's organizing power.

it took corporations, what, a decade to figure out how to co-opt it.

But when big institutions finally figured it out,

to magnify and they got  even more powerful.

The distributed are more nimble and quicker to make use their new power.

The institutional are slower but able to use power more effectively.

So all the Syrian dissidents used Facebook to organize.

The Syrian government used Facebook to identify and arrest dissidents.

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【TEDx】The Battle for Power on the Internet: Bruce Schneier at TEDxCambridge 2013

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