Last summer I wrote about the German ban on hacking tools and how similar (and similarly stupid) it was to gun bans.

Now comes news the UK are criminalizing hacking tools. Frankly, I’m amazed it took them so long; I’ve come to expect British leadership in the field of subjugation and benign tyranny.

Anyway, the writing is on the wall for the Internet. All the starry-eyed visionaries of the early- and mid-nineties (myself included), looking eagerly forward to a world in cyberspace free of government meddling, censorship, and ignorant laws, where information was free and plentiful, very clearly underestimated the will and ability of governments to seek out and eliminate ‘harmful’ freedoms (for a painful look back at our naive idealism, read the Hacker Manifesto).

The party’s over now. China and the Arab nations are censoring the shit out of the ‘net, Australia isn’t far behind, we have the DMCA in the States, bans on hacking tools in Germany and the UK, prison time for failure to disclose encryption keys to British police, and honestly, how long until a ban on crypto and censorship circumvention tools? You think all the regulation of ‘hate speech’ in Canada, the EU, and the UN, won’t require extensive control over Internet traffic to enforce? What about ‘child pornography’ and ‘terrorism’? Or ‘campaign finance reform’? In the 21st century, governments and powerful groups continue to fight to control speech and behaviors they dislike; the difference is, we have the Internet now, which makes the Internet a huge target.

It’s clearly past time for some serious work on real Internet privacy and anti-censorship tools, against both government intrusions and corporate IT dictators. Sure, there are projects like Freenet and Tor and Psiphon, all exploring various solutions to the problem of anonymous/private communication, but there’s a problem: none of them are particularly subtle about it, which means once any of them reaches critical mass, the censorious regimes of the world, and the software companies that enable their censorship, will block the services at best, or track and punish the services’ users at worst.

What I would like to see from the community is a suite of tools for anonymous, secure, and hidden communication channels, over both the public IP networks and private, ac-hoc point-to-point links. Tools utilizing covert channels, traffic analysis countermeasures, and run-of-the-mill SSL to hide secure traffic in otherwise-innocent traffic.

I’m not sure why this isn’t an issue receiving more attention from the technology community. Perhaps government oversight of the Internet isn’t bad enough yet. Perhaps work is being done under the radar in small groups running private darknets. Perhaps there are projects operating in the open that I just don’t know about yet. But something needs to be done, before it’s too late.