A senior Mozilla executive says he’s increasingly concerned that many politicians are “clueless about the internet”.
Speaking to TrustedReviews, Mark Surman, the executive director at the Mozilla Foundation, revealed that the leaders deciding on tech law in Washington and Whitehall might not be up to scratch.
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He continued: “It’s a huge risk, and it’s the reason that we see bad laws coming forward like the Snoopers’ Charter, and SOPA, which I think shifted things as much as Snowden in terms of online activism.”
The Snoopers’ Charter, officially named the Investigatory Powers Bill, is a draft bill proposed by Home Secretary Theresa May, which would force Internet Service Providers to retain a history of the websites visited by every UK citizen on a rolling one-year basis. The charter also mandates that UK police and intelligence officers will be able access this data without a warrant.
SOPA, meanwhile, was a controversial United States bill aimed at tackling piracy, and would have prevented search engines from linking to copyright-infringing websites. The bill was eventually scrapped.
Bemoaning such laws, Surman argued that we can’t afford to keep taking “18th or 19th Century thinking, and applying it to 21st Century technology”.
The UN estimates that more than 3 billion people now use the internet globally
Surman said that discussions about technology – and encryption, in particular – shouldn’t be about “a trade-off between privacy and national security”, but instead about how we can create “safe democratic societies in the digital age”.
“Digital literacy is key, whether it’s for young people or older people, because it ties back to opportunity, personal safety, and democracy,” Surman told us.
“I think the issue we have is people just don’t understand the digital world, even though it’s so central to their life. Understanding privacy relates back to everything from identity theft to protecting your bank account,” the Mozilla exec continued. “Everyone should know the basics about encryption.”
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The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit founded by Mozilla – the Firefox browser folks – to help promote “openness, innovation, and participation on the internet”.
“The easier computers become to use, the more important digital literacy is,” Surman added. “To understand what’s going on is how we can shape our lives and avoid being exploited.”
Do you think politicians have a good track record on tech legislation? Let us know in the comments.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.