DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [77]
That does not imply that the Internet regimes of Western governments represent a model of free speech. On the contrary, as our dependency on the Internet increases, so the desire, ability and will of governments to control it strengthen. Despite habitual protests by civil servants and politicians that no such process is under way, the tortured and slow death of Internet privacy in the West, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, is a sad – albeit visible – reality and is probably inevitable.
The response to 9/11, in the name of combating terrorism, severely curtailed our freedom from state interference on the Web. The main tool in the US was the Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme, although even the Bush administration, with its congenital tin ear, eventually realised that the name had so many Orwellian associations that it should be renamed the Terrorism Information Awareness programme.
The TIA afforded DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and detection wing, considerable access to data gleaned from private communications. Although the programme was eventually closed down, many of its powers were retained by government and distributed among different agencies in the United States.
Elsewhere, in a landmark case, the Supreme Court consented to the FBI deploying key-logger trojans onto the computers of suspects, although under court supervision. This enabled the FBI to log everything that the suspect would do on his computer, just as the cyber criminal does when he infects a third-party computer with a key logger. At the turn of the millennium the European Parliament confirmed the existence of Echelon, the United States’s global spy programme that is allegedly capable of homing in on digital communications anywhere in the world.
In a directive issued under the UK’s presidency of the European Union, Internet Service Providers in Europe were obliged to start storing all computer traffic (this applies to mobile phones as well) for between six months and two years – data that a variety of governmental agencies can access under national legislation. If these moves towards digital surveillance continue, Western governments (usually in the name of anti-terrorism strategies and law enforcement) will be in an ever better position to monitor the movements and habits of their citizens.
Researchers at the London School of Economics best described our chosen path. In June 2009 they asked the reader to imagine:
the government having a deaf security agent following every single person everywhere they go. The agent cannot hear the content of any interactions, but can otherwise observe every minute detail of someone’s life: the time they wake up, how they drive to work, who they talk to and for how long, and how their business is doing, their health, the people they meet in the street, their social activities, their political affiliations, the papers and specific articles they read, and their reaction to those, the food in their shopping basket, and whether they eat healthily, how well their marriage is going, the extra-marital affairs, their dates and intimate relations. Since most of these interactions are today mediated at some level by telecommunications services, or are facilitated by mobile devices, all of this information will now reside with our internet service providers, ready and waiting for government access.
At least in the West, we stand a fighting chance of resisting some of the more draconian powers that various branches of government are seeking to acquire over civil Internet activity.
Given the strength of the civil-liberties community in the West and the KGB’s comprehensive surveillance of the Internet, one might assume that Russia would represent an implacably hostile environment for cyber criminals. Yet the Russian Federation has become one of the great centres of global cybercrime.