USA vs the world: The problems with PRISM

USA vs the world: The problems with PRISM: Page 2 of 2

By Gabey Goh June 25, 2013

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In his opinion editorial outlining PRISM’s impact on the Asia Pacific region, Dr Jeremy Malcolm (pic), a senior policy officer at Consumers International, outlined that communications between non-US citizens that happen to be routed, cached or logged by or through US servers or systems can be lawfully captured in full without any of the constitutional safeguards that US citizens enjoy.

In addition, he noted that Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand and Japan are currently negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement with the United States (the TPP, or TPPA), which contains a section that encourages the free flow of information across borders.

“One of the impacts of this is that it may become more difficult for countries to legally shield their citizens' communications from US-based networks and cloud services, which are wide open to NSA surveillance,” he said.

When asked what’s the way forward for the security industry given the fresh round of discussions on access and privacy sparked by PRISM, Sophos’ Forsyth said that such debate was good to get the public aware of where we’re really going.

“The Internet revolution has changed the world we live in, and the rate of change will continue to accelerate. With the Internet of Things just around the corner and machine-to-machine communications to outstrip people-to-people, we will need new laws,” he said.

“Things are going to evolve rapidly over the next five years, and the world needs to find a way to deal with it. Laws have typically lagged about five years behind real world developments and in the coming months, you’ll definitely see a lot of new laws being introduced,” he added.

In addition, with the cat already out of the bag concerning access to data, in the corporate IT space, encryption tools are going to become increasingly important.

“We're going to have companies needing to protect their ‘crown jewels’, such as, confidential information or trade secrets,” he said.

Forsyth also called for greater efforts from the security industry to establish a global forum to address the issues surrounding the security and management of Internet access.

“Right now there’s no place for all the different players from government and private sector entities and privacy advocates to come together to tackle these issues,” he said.

The key moving forward is the establishment of such a forum, with Forsyth noting that such efforts to date have been uneven and underfunded.

In his view, such a move has to come from the top, from an agency such as ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) or an independent global body much like the United Nations to pull things together, though he added that a body made up of countries would be subject to sovereign desires.

“Stakeholders need to take ownership not of the Internet, but of the forum where all can come together to discuss the issues. You can’t solve the problem until you establish who owns it,” he said.

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