Networker: Enlightenment or control

A few years ago Clifford Stoll wrote The Cuckoo's Egg, an
account of his attempts to track down some network hackers taking advantage
of university computer networks to look at low security US military sites.

At the time he had difficulty convincing US military authorities to
even bother tracking these hackers. Their view was that if there was no
identifiable damage, and no national secrets at stake, there was no problem.

Today all the major security organisations in the US and Europe have
discovered the benefits of network hacking. First, it is now presented
as a “terrorist” activity, deserving the highest levels of vigilance, with
all the government funding that implies. Secondly, they are recognising
that the internet provides a basis for significant social control.

The recent protests in Quebec City against the Summit of the Americas
are a case in point. During the protests, agents of the US FBI and Secret
Service raided the Seattle-based Independent Media Center. The alternative
media web site had featured Canadian police security plans against the
demonstrators.

Under US law, providing this information is not illegal. Nevertheless,
according to Patti Waldmeir writing in the May 10 London Financial Times,
the raiders served a court order demanding the internet addresses of everyone
who had visited the site during the previous 48 hours.

This level of social control is impossible when information is released
as posters on a wall or as unauthorised leaflets handed out to passers-by.
The internet gives previously impossible reach to alternative views, but
it also enables the tracking of every visitor to a web site.

Overt attempts to police internet users in the US and Europe have generally
failed. US government proposals to patrol computers with special chips,
FBI email policing, and computer chip manufacturer attempts to make this
easy have always met a hostile response when made public.

But there is an alternate path to control, and that is the one being
developed commercially in the name of advertising.

Advertising budgets for internet business have fallen dramatically in
the past year. The solution of these businesses is to identify their viewers
more and more precisely in order to promise better product targeting.

Major initiatives are currently underway to develop technologies and
systems that can identify to within a city block where a web “surfer” resides
(to sell them location-based services such as pizzas). Companies now hold
details of the “surfing” patterns of tens of millions of internet users.

At present data privacy restrictions prevent those details being linked
to the names of actual people. Security forces, however, have access to
the same or better technology and are free from any such restrictions.

The internet could represent a bright future of information distribution,
discovery and enlightenment. The security organisations of the capitalist
state have a different vision — the internet as a dense web of social control.

BY GREG HARRIS

(gregharris_greenleft@hotmail.com)

From GLW issue 448