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A call for Internesia

All over the world, governments are riding roughshod over the privacy rights of their citizens, and NZ is no exception.

No matter where you look, politicians and bureaucrats are empowering themselves to snoop on people's email, phone calls, and (no doubt) cloud content. Add to this the growing number of CCTV cameras, number-plate recognition systems and other surveillance technology and it becomes obvious that our political overlords are suffering from severe paranoia -- the type of paranoia that would likely see you or I committed to institutional psychiatric care.

Google, Yahoo and others confirm that they are fighting hard to protect the rights of their users but they must comply with the laws of the countries from which they operate so when "the man" says "hand over that data", their options are very limited.

So maybe it's time for a change. A change that is now long overdue.

The Net is a borderless environment. Packets of data don't know or care which country they're coming from, headed for or passing through. They are geo-agnostic.

Cyberspace is (or at least should be) a separate legal domain. A jurisdiction that is as unique and sovereign as that of any nation on the face of the earth.

So let's make it that way!

I propose the creation of the independent virtual-nation of Internesia.

This sovereign nation would exist only in cyberspace and have its own laws that applied to all internet traffic and users, regardless of where in the physical world they existed.

Through the creation of this virtual nation, a totally consistent set of laws could then be applied to all online activities in a way that would ensure that users in one nation are not extradited by another for alleged crimes, even though they had never stepped foot on foreign soil.

Most important of all, Internesia would be a virtual-nation that was beyond the control or grasp of the real-world politicians whose paranoia has destroyed our rights to privacy.

Of course the real problem is "how do we create a virtual nation?"

Well that might be a lot simpler than you'd think.

Such a nation could live as a widely distributed application buried under a thick veil of hard encryption. The distributed nature of Internesia would protect it from a focused attack by authorities and the hard encryption would make its data inaccessible to the paranoid attentions of individual governments of the real-world.

Internesia would need to have some strong laws to prevent things such as trafficking in child-porn and the like otherwise real-nations would simply declare access to its services to be illegal on the grounds that it was a "hotbed of illicit material".

It would also require a very open and transparent governance -- but that's something which could be easily achieved by use of the mechanisms the Net delivers and perhaps the introduction of virtual electorates and something like the Recoverable Proxy system.

Perhaps this may be a great idea for some crowdsourced funding to create the apps and basic infrastructure necessary to kick-start this new and independent virtual nation.

If any group of people care enough about their privacy and rights, surely it has to be the internet community.

Hands up all those who think it is time for the formation of Internesia (or something similar).

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