The founders of Golden Frog, the privacy and security oriented software and online services firm that brings us the top VPN VyprVPN, rubbed elbows with hot privacy activist Edward Snowden at SXSW this year. They were invited to the exclusive session along with 25 other leaders in the tech industry to talk about the next vital steps for gaining and maintaining good cybersecurity and also for effectively battling the ongoing government surveillance efforts.
The Role of Personal VPNs in Cybersecurity and Anti-Snooping
The Yokubaitis brothers Sunday and Ron of course had to get a discussion going about personal VPNs during the Q&A session. Top representatives of the tech community were gathered, and this was the best chance to get into the meat of what the future of VPN technology should be. VPNs after all were not originally designed to protect the privacy of individual Internet users, and they of course need to be constantly improved to be able to fend off emerging attacks. But they are so far the best ones that we have to work with to help us stay protected despite the big holes that still exist in government policy.
Snowden has always heralded encryption as the best chance we have for both security and privacy online. But the US government has worked many angles to try to get around encryption technology, and we can also be sure that other governments likewise see encryption as a threat to their spying abilities. This is both good news and bad. First, these almost desperate attempts to crack encryption technologies shows us that encryption is a good defense against even the most powerful and well-funded government efforts to continue spying on people. It is very expensive and time-consuming to break encryption, so we need to do more of it to increase our chances of winning the battle.
The discussion extended to the future of VPNs and Snowden pointed out that VPN technology must be developed to conceal its use of encryption. One of the government’s primary goals is to defeat encryption, so we need to make it hard for them to detect it in the first place. As it is, there are ways to identify VPN traffic because encrypted communications leave a mark that can be traced, leaving VPN traffic as a target. So VPNs need to start looking into ways of hiding the fact that they send encrypted traffic so that it will become not only exceedingly laborious to decode our personal Internet activities but also extraordinarily difficult to even locate that traffic in the first place.
Snowden also talked about randomizing efforts that need to be undertaken by tech companies. He explained that this is to defend against spying that takes place on the network level. Deep packet inspection is being used by governments around the world to keep track of what kind of traffic is passing over their networks. This could be for content censorship or for intelligence gathering. Closing that gap is important to ensure privacy for all Internet users.
Tech Policy to Combat Government Surveillance
We definitely need clearer and stronger policies that deal with privacy rights on the Internet. This is the legislation that is going to protect people against invasive spying. But we all know that the law isn’t going to be enough protection. We have seen countless times how even government agencies themselves ignore or manipulate the law to serve their own, obviously illegal, ends. Plus, it really doesn’t look like government spying is going away anytime, despite the promising campaign of presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul. The spy game has been going on for so long that it has been effectively ingrained into our world culture. It seems from the discussion that the best thing we can do is to protect ourselves from it. The staunchest of privacy fighters also believe than even when the time comes that we have better policies in place to control government spying, we should still have and use the right tools to secure our sensitive information.
We can’t wait for the government to provide us with the protection that we need. This takes too long, and it will never be a guaranteed sort of protection. They key lies in products and services developed by the tech industry specifically to secure the privacy and security that we desperately need and want. But the government can still help. They can stop spies from trying to create backdoors into networks (which will probably just end up making them vulnerable to cybercriminal attacks) and they can stop giving money for illicit snooping and instead fund cybersecurity. One thing that Snowden said desperately needs an infusion is SSL libraries, which are currently kept together by volunteers. This critical infrastructure needs decent financial support to be able to properly respond to threats and deal with existing vulnerabilities.
