will NOT protect your privacy or identity

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Mon, 5 Dec 2005 10:25:02 -0800 (PST)

will NOT protect your privacy or identity

November 17, 2005

 

 

 

 

 

The End of Anonymity

By John Feffer

 

 

 

The Internet is a great place for anonymity. A woman can go into a

chat room on the Web and pretend to be a man. A teenager can pretend

to be a lawyer and give out free legal advice. A blogger with a

pseudonym can dispense inside gossip about the government or Hollywood

or the corporate world.

 

But anonymity is a much more precious commodity these days on the

Internet. Just ask Chinese journalist Shi Tao.

 

Last year, the Chinese government told Shi Tao's newspaper - the daily

Contemporary Trade News of Changsha in Hunan Province - not to play up

the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. When Shi Tao

leaked this information to the outside world by email, the Chinese

government demanded that furnish information about the identity

of the sender. complied. As a result, Shi Tao has been sentenced

to ten years in prison.

 

In the United States, editorial writers, human rights activists, and

Republican congressmen have accused of putting profit before

principle in its relations with Beijing. According to these critics,

the Internet provider will do anything to keep its foot in the Chinese

market, even to the point of besmirching the ideal of free speech.

says it was simply obeying Chinese laws.

 

Strangely, in all of this outrage, no one has pointed out that

Internet providers face the same dilemma...in the United States.

 

For some time, the U.S. government has monitored Internet traffic

within the United States. The surveillance software, an earlier

version of which was appropriately called Carnivore, acts much like a

wiretap. U.S. law enforcement officials must get a court order to use

the program against particular individuals, and the public simply has

to trust that the investigators are not going beyond their mandate.

 

At the international level, the shadowy National Security Agency runs

a program called " Echelon. " Although little is known about the top spy

agency and its programs, Echelon is essentially a huge filter that

looks for key words or phrases like " al Qaeda " or " suicide bomber " in

the vast accumulation of global electronic communication. Although

designed to target " terrorists " and the like, Echelon has been used to

monitor groups like Greenpeace and Amnesty International in the United

Kingdom. Despite U.S. constitutional protections, the NSA used Echelon

to monitor the activities of U.S. citizens. When discovered, this

monitoring led to widespread outcry and a 1978 law banning domestic

spying except under certain circumstances.

Those " certain circumstances, " which include counter-terrorism, became

a much larger category after the U.S. Congress passed the USA PATRIOT

Act after September 11. The PATRIOT Act gave the U.S. government

expanded powers to pursue terrorists, which included Internet

surveillance.

 

As a result of the PATRIOT Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigation

(FBI) can find out the true identity of Internet users without a court

order. The FBI merely has to argue that the information is in some way

relevant to a terrorism or espionage investigation. According to the

watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation, " the FBI has been using

this new power aggressively, although the agency itself has been

unwilling to disclose even the most basic statistical information. " A

recent Washington Post article on " The FBI's Secret Scrutiny "

estimated that the FBI now issues more than 30,000 annual requests for

private information on Americans not suspected of any crime - one

hundred times more than it did prior to the passage of the PATRIOT Act.

The U.S. government uses words like " national security " and

" counter-terrorism " to justify such infringements of civil liberties.

And so does the Chinese government. The Chinese government considers

the Tiananmen Square protests a matter of national security. And the

Chinese government considers dissidents -- as well as Falun Gong and

various liberation movements -- to be terrorists.

 

So how should a business like respond to this situation? It

could follow a policy of relinquishing private information to whatever

government asks for it. Or it could refuse to provide any information

on the grounds of freedom of speech and illegal search and seizure

laws -- which would mean standing up not only to the Chinese

government but to the U.S. government as well.

 

By giving the name of Shi Tao to the Chinese government, was

being very consistent in its policies. After all, it hasn't made much

of a fuss about the PATRIOT Act. But consistency is not always a good

thing. On the issue of the Internet and civil liberties, has

been consistently wrong.

 

John Feffer (www.johnfeffer.com) is the author, most recently, of

North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis.

 

 

" With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can

succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than

he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. "

— Abraham Lincoln