July 29

Big Browser is Watching You!
Sun Review July 29, 2000

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy once said: "There is no privacy, get over it."

This is especially true in the UK, where all incoming and outgoing e-mail messages are currently being monitored by the government, purportedly in order to keep tabs on criminal activities.

This latest invasion of privacy is nothing new to the Brits, who were one of the first countries to install video cameras at high crime locations in busy urban areas to catch criminals (and innocent people) on tape. This camera surveillance system is now being adopted world-wide, in countries such as the United States and even Canada.

If that makes you wonder about whether there is any privacy in your own country, you should know that e-mail monitoring is next on the list (if it is not in place already!). I visited the CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) website (www.csis-scrs.gc.ca ) for more information on e-mail monitoring initiatives in this country, but could neither confirm nor deny the rumours.

In the U.S., it has been reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is covertly using a superfast system called Carnivore to search millions of e-mails in hopes of flagging messages from criminal suspects. Understandably, many Americans are unhappy with the FBI's interpretation of the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures unless there is probable cause supported by an oath or affirmation. Warrants must particularly describe the place, things and persons to be seized, so the blanket e-mail surveillance of the innocent clearly violates the provision that unreasonable searches are prohibited.

If the British government could have monitored the communications of the colonists, the Americans may never have broken King George's bonds of tyranny. It sure makes you wonder.

The truth is that any computer-literate terrorist organization could easily escape detection by both the FBI e-mail scanning system and "Echelon ", the U.S. government's alleged electronic surveillance network.

If you're worried about your personal anonymity on the Internet, visit Anonymizer (www.anonymizer.com), which lets you surf anonymously from any computer, regardless of where you are. Meanwhile, other Internet users feel that innocent people have little to fear and much to gain from the FBI's inquiries. Why not let the FBI scan people's e-mail? If you're not a criminal, then you have nothing to worry about. Now the FBI has yet another high tech tool to add to its crime-fighting arsenal.

Well, Simson Garfinkel still hasn't gotten over this invasion of privacy. And neither will you, if you read his book Database Nation. In the space of just 271 pages, computer-security expert and author Garfinkel hammers home perhaps the most compelling account yet of how big business, aided by government agencies and a complicit Congress, is stealing Americans' best defense against tyranny: their very ability to be left alone.

As Thomas Jefferson once penned, "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it".

Every time we allow the government to grow in power at the expense of the people, we put ourselves in jeopardy of losing the ability to free ourselves if it goes too far.