The Internet is not a place where you can abuse and go dirty dancing as you desire. While indiscriminate snooping by Government agencies on private data is condemnable, complete freedom for users of the virtual world is dangerous
Each discovery and innovation comes at a cost. The gift that Tim Berners-lee gave the world in 1990 is no exception. While, the World Wide Web has revolutionised the very ways the global economy, various national Governments and ordinary individuals function, the price tag it bears is significant. What are the focal points of dispute that I’m referring to hereIJ Two questions. Are acts of espionage over the Internet healthyIJ Is surveillance over the web a necessary component of some greater good for a society, one that claims to be democraticIJ
As per a 2013 report published in Web Index (the annual journal of the World Wide Web Consortium), the surge of online censorship and surveillance is a potential threat to the very “future of democracy”.
That incidences related to spying and surveillance (on the web) are causing tides that the Internet was not originally expected to influence is no surprise. The Internet threw open an age of information, where flow of information was expected to occur without bottlenecks or barricades — between individuals, groups, societies, nations, et cetera — the very prerequisite for democracy. It is not difficult to understand that this freedom of thought-and-information sharing is the quickest way to empowering commoners and allowing them to choose what’s best for their own future. But no innovation is unconditional. The leakage of classified documents in the first half of this year by a former CIA employee and US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden shocked the world. It proved the existence of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programmes and how the US agency and its counterparts like the British GCHQ, Israel’s ISNU and Norway’s NIS, in their efforts to keep a close eye on all forms of communication between and within foreign terrorist groups, were accessing vast amounts of public user data from American and non-American Internet companies (including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Skype, etc), without the knowledge of the users. Invasion of privacy is what these surveillance programmes sans court warrants, like PRISM, XKeyscore, Tempora and many others, would be termed.
And think of the count of such invasions: As per a certain British media outfit, in March alone, the NSA collected 97 billion pieces of information from web networks around the world, of which three billion came from American networks. If we were to talk about each Internet-using earthling being treated at par, that would amount to 39 pieces of information (including voice communication and chats over the web) being recorded per person during the month of March alone — for the months of 2013, 429 facts about ‘you’. (Just wondering, is there a chance that your banking password could be in that bunchIJ)
The question arises: Has the Internet become a medium where freedom, privacy and democracy are just words you can type in and not really experienceIJ “We hack everyone, everywhere… The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under”, whistle-blower Snowden told a British media outfit in Hong Kong in recent months. Think he was lying or unsureIJ
How less truthful can a person get, one who is determined to wage war against the biggest superpower in the world (and one who knows that “nothing good” will happen to him once the American and British and other Governments get after him)IJ Again the question is: How much privacy can you disrespect in the name of national securityIJ
The Internet has contributed much to human knowledge and ease of living, and continues to do so. Search engines, Internet sites, social networks have changed lives around the world. In fact, the very idea of globalisation has become more meaningful because of the rise of the Internet.
Apart from bringing about a sea change in human lifestyle, democratic movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street were largely engineered by social networking sites. More than 1.5 billion people around the world have an account on these sites and more than 2.5 billion have access to the magic wand called the www. And going by this large number, restrictions and some form of legal control should exist on the Internet. Mind you, legal control.
The Internet is not a place where you can abuse and go dirty dancing as you desire. I quote from the cover story I just mentioned, “Take a quick ‘surf’ across various pages of the Internet and it would not be hard for one to realise that every fourth or fifth page is filled up with some or the other pejoratively aberrant content against respectable individuals and companies posted by untraceable, incognito and spiteful writers. The net is now so completely full of criminally damnable statements that one starts wondering why the authorities haven’t woken up to act on this issue with the greatest speed. The question is, why is all this not ‘controllable’IJ”
(The writer is a management guru and honorary director of IIPM Think Tank)