14 DAY TRIAL // An independent commission headed by the former Swedish Foreign Minister, Carl Bildt, is going to investigate the future of the Internet in the wake of all the revelations based on Edward Snowden’s leaked NSA files.
The inquiry is expected to take place for two years and it was announced at the World Economic Forum at Davos. It will focus on state censorship applied to the Internet, but also countless other issues related to privacy and surveillance, The Guardian reports.
The 25-member panel will include politicians, academics and former intelligence officials, as well as other people from all over the world.
“The rapid evolution of the net has been made possible by the open and flexible model by which it has evolved and been governed. But increasingly this is coming under attack,” Bildt said.
He also said that net freedom, security and surveillance are currently coming under debate. “Net freedom is as fundamental as freedom of information and freedom of speech in our societies,” the former minister states.
It wasn’t long ago that Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web stated that there was a major threat looming over the Internet. He said that this particular threat was posed by people who were trying to connect the Internet on the sly. His statements came after the PRISM program was revealed in June. Ever since then, he’s made a point of joining the fight against surveillance.
The announcement comes just a few days after Barack Obama revealed several reforms that were to be implemented in the NSA. However, as everyone has pointed out before, these reforms won’t really change much and the most important issues haven’t even been touched.
Regardless, this isn’t just a matter of putting a stop to the United States’ mass surveillance practices, but rather to get all governments to quit such programs. Just because the NSA’s the one under the magnifying glass right now, it doesn’t mean that it’s the only government agency violating privacy of individuals across the world.