“The internet has largely been run as the ‘United States Benign Dictatorship’ because everyone kind of believed the United States was acting in the world’s best interest,” Schneier said yesterday at the 88th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Vancouver, Canada. “That’s over.”

Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, said that more revelations about spy programmes are yet to come.

IETF Area Director Stephen Farrell said the technical community should handle this as an attack on the security of the systems and answer accordingly.

In a rare expression of political conviction, the plenary of the engineers unanimously agreed to take the “new threat model” into consideration when standardising protocols.

Some participants warned afterwards that putting the belief into practice could be a lot more contentious. More encryption for a variety of protocols, including the web protocol and the more difficult to protect email protocol (SMTP) were discussed by working groups at the Vancouver meeting. 

Ubiquitious encryption on the internet backbone would do “enormous good,” said Scheier, adding, “Encryption will force the NSA to go after only high-value targets.”

A more long-term goal, Schneier told the engineers, is to promote the understanding that a “secure internet is in everyone’s best interest.” Without a broad consensus on this, he said, there will be no political solutions.