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)