The notion of free speech may not last very much longer if the US Department of Homeland Security succeeds in its ongoing attempt to steal the whole bloody internet:
DHS Wants Master Key for DNS
Posted by Zonk on Saturday March 31, @01:33PM
from the they-own-all-the-locks-and-doors dept.An anonymous reader writes
“At an ICANN meeting in Lisbon, the US Department of Homeland Security made it clear that it has requested the master key for the DNS root zone. The key will play an important role in the new DNSSec security extension, because it will make spoofing IP-addresses impossible. By forcing the IANA to hand out a copy of the master key, the US government will be the only institution that is able to spoof IP addresses and be able to break into computers connected to the Internet without much effort. There’s a further complication, of course, because even ‘if the IANA retains the key … the US government still reserves the right to oversee ICANN/IANA. If the keys are then handed over to ICANN/IANA, there would be even less of an incentive [for the U.S.] to give up this role as a monitor. As a result, the DHS’s demands will probably only heat up the debate about US dominance of the control of Internet resources.'”
This is not just about paranoid American security bods trying to control their own national corner of the internet: this is about the blatant theft by Bushco, dressed up in its spiffy Homeland Security costume, of the DNS root servers, the basic infrastructure of the whole world-wide web.
The root DNS servers are essential to the function of the Internet, as so many protocols use DNS, either directly or indirectly. They are potential points of failure for the entire Internet. For this reason, there are 13 named root servers worldwide. There are no more root servers because a single DNS reply can only be 512 bytes long; while it is possible to fit 15 root servers in a datagram of this size, the variable size of DNS packets makes it prudent to only have 13 root servers.
They are housed in multiple sites with high bandwidth access, to try to prevent attacks such as distributed denial-of-service attacks. Most of these single-site installations are still in the United States. Usually each DNS server in a given site is actually a cluster of servers behind a load-balancing set of routers.
However, a number of root servers lie outside the United States:
i.root-servers.net is in Stockholm and many other locations using anycast
k.root-servers.net has globally visible nodes in Amsterdam, London, Miami, Delhi and Tokyo
m.root-servers.net is in Tokyo, Paris and Seoul using anycast
The modern trend is to use anycast to give resilience and to balance load across a wide geographic area. For example, j.root-servers.net, f.root-servers.net and k.root-servers.net are served using anycast from a number of sites worldwide. The use of anycast
has allowed the growth of non-U.S. root DNS servers until most DNS root instances are outside the U.S.Details of all the root servers can be seen at the root-servers.org website.
[My emphasis]
This isn’t just about market dominance. This is about invasion, colonialism and the pursuit of imperialist aims by other means. The theatre of war just happens to be virtual. The US government, or any other individual governmment for that matter, has no right to claim control over resources it does not own and which are not located on its territory. But it’s doing it anyway… eminent domain apparently works online too.
But where is the chorus of protest from the geeks?
From what I can see the majority of American IT professionals, with notable exceptions, have been remarkably quiet so far on political matters except for their ad infinitum online arguments about some spurious utopian future with libertarian transhumanisam, polyamory and rocky road ice-cream for all. The doors of their comfy padded cages are slamming shut and they don’t hear a thing. Their freedom (and ours) is being stolen from under their noses.
But hey, look, shiny new gadgets! Oooh, iPhone!
Geeky types like to think of themselves as rebels, outside the mainstream and cleverer than the rest of us lesser mortals. So why are they being so bloody supine while Bushco steals the web?
I have a question for any IT professionals reading this: dammit, people, you are the ones that control and support the IT infrastructure, you could stop this if you wanted to. You could put the skids under the entire Bushco venture if you had a mind.
But do you actually want to ? Homeland Security pays well…
So this is my question – do you really give a damn about freedom or are you just happy to be the future well-paid technocrats of the New Fascism? C’mon geeks, get up off your asses and fight for once, us non-geeks are relying on you.
