After the revelations of 2013, where the extent of nation-state pervasive monitoring was uncovered, the many members of the Internet Community took action to make the Internet and its users more secure.
Strengthening Internet Protocols
In May 2014, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) released IETF’s RFC 7258 stating that pervasive monitoring represents an attack against the Internet. In response, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) released their own IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality, which also recognizes that implementing this aspiration of pervasive encryption raises some practical issues and technical challenges.
Since 2014, the IETF Community has developed several new protocols and continue to work on others which aim to strengthen and make encryption the default for the Internet. One of these protocols is TLS 1.3, also known as Transport Layer Security version 1.3, which provides greater security for internet traffic as it passes over networks.
In September 2019, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) released the statement on Avoiding Unintended Harm to Internet Infrastructure that “discusses possible unintended effects policy and regulatory proposals may have on the Internet”.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) shared the findings Securing the Web and End-to-End Encryption and the Web, which highlight the importance of end-to-end encryption and trust for the success of the web.