In his book Fighting Terrorism, Benjamin Netanyahu describes a fundamental shift that most democracies go through in their battle against terrorism. Sooner or later, it becomes necessary for a democracy to adopt “anti-terror laws” which enable the government to take unprecedented action against terrorist through espionage, surveillance and other unorthodox methods. These anti-terror laws adopted have been restricted in time or effect, and subject to cancellation when no longer necessary. Britain adopted anti-terror laws and courts in facing the threat of the IRA; Germany likewise against Baader-Meinhof and the RAF; Italy, France, and several others at one point or other did the same. This is all necessary, and correct.
But since 9/11, the world seems to have taken a turn. The old mantra was Freedom, Freedom; the new one seems to be Safety, Safety. While some efforts to contain international terrorism – in similar ways to the anti-terror laws during the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s in Europe – are just and necessary; much additional “safety” is being sneaked in that do not immediately relate.
This is very scary, because it is coupled with the almost all-pervavise profileration of technology, all connected through the Internet.
The Internet, as such, is free. There are few laws imposed on it. It is possible to print, copy and publish almost anything – whether legally or not. Online, traditional national boundaries become fuzzy and jurisdiction is no longer self-evident. Who commits the crime and what laws apply when the publisher of malicious content sits in Sweden and the server on which the content is published is in Australia?
It is not strange, then, to hear politicians clamoring for more restrictions on the Internet. Congressmen in the US want all traffic logged, shouts the headlines boldly. The EU introduced legislation recently that would require all Internet Service Providers to log traffic for six months. All in the name of safety: To combat the great evils of the internet: Crime, terrorism, child pornography, abusers and so on. But this is very, very dangerous. To the uninitiated, it may seem like a good thing. But the physical equivalence of that – if we take the same logging measures and apply them to our daily lives – would be logging every phone call, everywhere we go, everything we purchase, everything we say or do in a gigantic database that can be searchable at will by government agencies to fight crime. As Bruce Schneier commented: It used to be “follow that car!” Now, it’s “follow every car!”
The immediate danger is not the data in the fight against cybercrime. The danger is that this all is a slippery slope. If it’s easy enough to introduce logging which may be used against people involved in child pornography today, then what’s the next step? Using it against all “cybercriminals”? Against political dissidents – such as China is doing? Against non-democratic elements? Against people who think and feel otherwise than the politically correct view? Against Christians?
“But it’s for the common good! We’re fighting terrorism!” Then why, kind Sir, do none of the present proposals for Internet traffic logging have any conditions imposed on it? Why are these not subject for annual review by a separate entity or committee? The anti-terror laws passed in Britain against the IRA were required to be renewed every year, otherwise they would by default expire. But no such things are mentioned today. And thus we enter down the slippery slope of wholesale surveillance, where we are constantly watched, day and night, in our every online activity (and why not our offline activities as well?) by men we don’t know, with all our actions and words logged and scrutinized by automatic systems set to trigger at predefined conditions. And these conditions may be changed, as time goes by, to suit the current political views. It is a wet dream of any would-be dictator, and indeed present-day dictators as well.
When during World War II President Franklin D. Roosevelt made his address to congress, he commented on four essential freedoms that all Americans shared: Freedom of speech and expression, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want and Freedom from fear. To me, freedom means not having to fear waking up in the middle of the night by police bursting through the door and dragging me and my wife out of bed because of something we did or said six months ago. Freedom means not having to think about what we say or how we say it, because we have freedom of speech that can never be contested.
The Internet is part of that. Internet transcends any boundaries, any controls, any limitations or censorships. It is as free as the wide-open seas… but maybe not for long. Soon, we may need to think about what we write or say online. Because every word we publish online – due to traffic logging – may be subject to the whim of a controlling part of a watchdog government, whom nobody controls. We may, in fact, be the last – and only – generation who lived to see a free Internet.
Programming .NET Security (available from