cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11349801
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The federal government of Canada will help to fund “a sovereign broadband backbone that connects Canadians from coast to coast to coast, with more direct and secure links to Europe and Asia,” Prime Minister Mark Carney announced.
A “broadband backbone” is the high-capacity core of the internet network that carries traffic between cities and countries. Speaking with reporters later, Mr. Carney said the backbone would also include connections to the Arctic.
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Representatives for Canada’s major telecom companies supported Mr. Carney’s announcement … As Mr. Carney’s government continues to seek alternatives to reduce dependence on the United States, calls have grown to develop more networking infrastructure that would avoid routing Canadian data through U.S. internet exchanges, thereby exposing that data to potential surveillance.
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Researchers at the University of Toronto and York University studying the journey taken by data between two points in Canada have found that, among their data sets, about a quarter of those journeys routed through American interchanges, exposing that information to access by the U.S. National Security Agency.
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Mr. Carney did not provide further details about the broadband project. However, discussions about the ownership and financing model for the project are currently being held between telecom companies and the Major Projects Office, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.
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is there a backdoor in https? I get resilience to preventing US from blocking Canadian packets, but back to first question.
If you don’t trust TLS you are out of luck. Maybe rent a server in the country you wish to talk to and tunnel over SSH with the new eliptic curve keys.
How a “Backdoor” in HTTPS Can Occur
Because HTTPS relies on the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol to encrypt data, any backdoor must target the underlying cryptography, implementation, or trust infrastructure:
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Weakened Cryptographic Standards: The US National Security Agency (NSA) has a documented history of attempting to introduce subtle flaws into global encryption standards. A prime historical example is the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. The NSA pushed for its inclusion in NIST standards in the mid-2000s, which later revealed a mathematical backdoor allowing anyone with the correct key to decrypt the resulting traffic.
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Compromised Certificate Authorities (CAs): HTTPS relies on a chain of trust managed by Certificate Authorities. These entities issue the digital certificates that verify a website’s identity. If a US-based CA were legally coerced (via classified directives like National Security Letters) to hand over its root keys or issue fraudulent certificates, an agency could execute a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack to decrypt HTTPS traffic seamlessly.
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Imposed Implementation Flaws:
Backdoors are often engineered directly into commercial hardware or software rather than the open-source protocol. Government agencies can exploit or intentionally plant vulnerabilities in proprietary routers, firewalls, and operating systems that handle HTTPS termination, allowing them to capture data right before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.
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Key Interception (PRISM): Revelations from 2013 leaked documents showed that under programs like PRISM, the US government bypassed the need to break HTTPS encryption entirely by compelling major tech companies to hand over data directly from their servers (at rest), rendering transit encryption irrelevant.
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Canada stepping up to fill the void the tea USA leaves would be so cool
Who is going to take over iCANN and all the other American organizations in control of the internet.
We honestly could just make our own alternative to iCANN, no one says we have to use the same DNS root servers as everyone else, we could run our own. It’s time we stop making the internet so centralized, it really wasn’t supposed to be.
I love this guy!
Don’t love him too much, he is still a banker and banks will fuck you for a dollar then charge you a few and interest.
Cool, now fix internet and cell prices to match europe and asia. I do not give a shit where my encrypted traffic gets routed if it costs 5x as much as the rest of the world.
Now this is finally getting to core problems with American dominance in tech.
Wait excuse me, CHINA ?
Where was China mentioned? I see it mention Asia. You know Asia is bigger than just China, right?
yes China has not threatened to annex Canada, so why the fuck not?
You should look more into the way they treat people and places they consider to be contested territory. It’s just as arbitrary and murderous as the US in that regard.
I’m all in favour of this, this is a way better boondoggle than Sovereign AI.
As an American, please do this, my government should not be in charge of the global internet
Not be in charge of global anything you mean.
also Canada needs nukes.
ITS LITERALLY THE ONLY THING AMERICA UNDERSTANDS.
Awesome! Don’t a few undersea cables already route through Canada? That should make it easier!
Courtesy @[email protected]
There are actually surprisingly few intercontinental submarine cables with an end-point in Canada and all of the ones to Europe go via Britain which, as shown by the Snowden Revelations, do bulk surveillance on everything going via the cables with end-points in Britain and pass that data to the US.
At first sight there seem to be only 2 “clean” submarine cables with end-points in Canada, one to Greenland and one to Japan.
Nova Scotia has a few and that one heading to Greenland too, right? It’s not perfect but it’s a good starting point and it’ll take only a few years to a decade to build these out. But your point about the eyes is valid.
But that’s not what they’re trying to prevent here, I think. They’re just trying to make it so that Canada is not dependent on US infra.
Busineswise, it makes sense that the one to Greenland when it was built did not need much capacity so it or at least its endpoints and routing in Canada and Greenland were probably not really designed to be able to take over a significant part of the traffic that goes to Europe via the US.
I might be wrong, it just makes sense to me for that to be the case from a systems design logic.
I thought that was the one that takes the financial data across at super speed? The one that shaved off a few milliseconds and it’s estimated that its value to financial ppl is in hundreds of millions per year?
I have no idea since I’m not Canadian.
Technically speaking, the bandwidth necessary for algorithmic trading is nowhere near that needed for bulk Internet traffic and generally in electronics (in this specific situation I’m thinking mostly of routing, though maybe it also applies whatever is used for maintaining long distance signal integrity in fiber, plus possibly single-mode vs multimode in fibre has transmission speed implications) if you’re trying to get the greatest speed possible you’re not going to get as much bandwidth since at the bleeding edge the optimizations done for one tend to have as tradeoff less of the other.
That said, this is all informed speculation (I worked in Finance, and have an EE Degree) rather than specific knowledge of that situation, so take it with a big pinch.
UBC has several big pipes, I’m sure there’s some on the East Coast too
Goddamn he’s on fire.
The madder Trump gets at Canada, the more sure we can be that we’re moving in the right direction.
Then there’s Little PP with the jelly spine who thinks we should play nice. I don’t know how the fuck anyone supports him at this point. Basically “lay back and think of England”. Pathetic.
Carney needs to stomp on the Moneris sale, or work with the EU to replace it. The US is already weaponizing payment systems against people they don’t like (literally “don’t like”, not even folks with criminal accusations of any sort…)
As the PM of a member nation of the Five Eyes, I’m pretty sure he’s keenly aware of the mass surveillance done on the Internet traffic of everybody (even of that from nations referred to as “allies”) routed through nodes controlled by Five Eyes member nations and the uses of that info for industrial espionage and political interference.
When setting up his sovereign internet network might want to bypass the UK too, by the way, given that as the Snowden Revelations showed they were some of the worst at this and already back then used their control of the end-points of most Atlantic underwater cables connecting Europe to North America, to do massive amounts of surveillance on Internet traffic between Europe to North America and then gave tons of that info to the US.
Including Britain in this network would just be a two-step way of giving the info to the US rather than direct.
In terms of cross-country/continental communication, this provides a bit more context on the current dependencies Canada faces. This is a great move in the right direction.
Skeptical ye ol Carney will achieve this in his current term, it’s a lot of work to do, and even if he does I suspect this will just be another tool to track Canadians.
