Making Privacy an Infrastructure Design Issue

The University of Toronto's Faculty of Information including over 40 of its professors, makes the following recommendation which makes all the fuss about overreaching copyrights mute; "We recommend: Making privacy an infrastructure design issue in Canada as well as a communication regulation issue."

We should educate Canadians of their right to become anonymous, to surf anonymously, and to host anonymously. Canadians have had every reason to believe that they were anonymous online for decades now. In truth, they haven't been, but they didn't know that. Teach them the truth, teach them to use privacy tools, if only to keep the power out of the hands of Hollywood, corrupt governments or ISP employees, and identity thieves. As a by–product, we lead the world in this new way of thinking and we save democracy and freedom of speach for everyone else, too. The alternative, an expensive loosing battle for any government, is to let Hollywood filter at the network level, and then ban encryption. However, encryption is easy to hide, and then impossible to find. And network filtering, checking every packet against an enourmous list of copyrighted material, will be impossibly slow, and disruptively inaccurate.