Internet Privacy and the Government
10/27/2008Britain's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has announced plans for a central database that would record every email, phone call, and website visit made in Britain. Although the Liberal Democrats party has called this proposal Orwellian , Smith maintains that the database would not include any content of the emails or phone calls, but rather more basic information pertaining to times and email addresses of senders and recipients of electronic messages.
The purpose of these plans is to facilitate law enforcement personnel in child pornography investigations aimed at Islamist terrorists. Last week's announcement closely follows the conclusions law enforcement officials have reached linking Muslim terrorists to child pornography. The United Kingdom's First Post claims that secret messages have been embedded in child porn images and that officials believe that terrorists are using child pornography websites as vehicles to communicate with one another. This web-based terrorism has reportedly developed within the past few years, as Muslims in Britain have been finding it increasingly difficult to accept money from abroad and to maintain radical mosques. Britain's new plan would give them the opportunity to potentially catch terrorists on charges related to child pornography.
Britain, however, is not the only nation considering a plan of this reach and magnitude. Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Ltd., an Australian company is now marketing software called CopyRouter to Internet service providers that would perform a check on every file passing through the network to see if it matches a list of illegal images. These methods for keeping tabs on illicit material (and the people who view it) on the net have been met with strong opposition. Britain's Liberal Democrats described Smith's database proposal as incompatible with a free country and people on our side of the pond have raised issues of unconstitutional invasion with regards to the monitoring of all Internet traffic.
New U.S. legislation written by Senator John McCain gives ISPs access to lists of child pornography files (previously only available to law enforcement agencies and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children), and makes it a felony for an ISP to fail to report child pornography if the provider is aware of its dissemination on their network. Actually using the lists for monitoring purposes is not required under the new law.
The notion of keeping tabs on Internet and mobile phone users and the files they share with each other cannot thoroughly be examined without taking into ethical consideration the role the government should play in Internet privacy and safety. Under the plans outlined above, there would be complete privacy with regards to the content of emails and phone calls, but not with regards to files that are sent over a network. Trading - or even (knowingly) possessing - child pornography on the Internet is already illegal, however, which begs the questions: should ISPs or some other higher power have dominion over what we do on their networks? Over what we do on our own computers and cell phones?
