13 March 2014

Comsec as Essential Public Utility

Snowden has raised the prospect of comsec as a public utility like power, water, gas, sewage, air quality, environmental protection and telecommunications. Privacy protection has been shown to be illusory at best, deceptive at worst, due to the uncontrollable technology applied excessively for national security. Ubiquitous spying has envrionmentally contaminated the realm of public discource.

Each of the other public utilities began as private offerings before becoming commercialized and then institutionalized as necessities, many eventually near or wholly monopolies.

Each also evolved into military targets for control, contamination, destruction, and in some cases excluded as too essential for civilian livelihood to target.

Comsec as a right for human discourse rather than a commercial service could enforce privacy beyond easy violation for official and commercial purposes.

Freedom of comsec, say, as a new entry in the US Bill of Rights could lead the way for it to be a fundamental element of Human Rights.

The challenge will be, as ever, the commercial and governmental exploiters aiming to protect their interests against that of the public.

FCC and NIST, indeed, the three branches, are hardly reliable to pursue this, so beholden to the spy agencies they cannot be trusted.

Ubiquitous NSA, commercial and institutional spying -- data gathering -- on everybody at home and elsewhere with technology beyond accountability does raise the chances of getting agreement of all targets -- gov, com, edu, org -- to say enough is enough, national and economic security has become a catchall for inexcusable damage to essential public communications.