Surveillance on the Internet
Internet spying is more plethoric than you think
Like snails sliming across the ground, humans leave trails with every move they make. While most trails can be blurred in the chaos of day-to-day life, the one place where all our actions can be traced with pinpoint accuracy is the Internet.
Think about the last thing you did online. Maybe you purchased a new golf club, wrote an e-mail to a friend, or did something as simple as search for the weather forecast on Google. Chances are, these actions have all been recorded in your personal Internet file, and anything covert could be held against you in a court of law.
Nothing We Do Online is Secret
Governments have always used whatever means necessary to collect knowledge about populations in secretive and dubious ways. With the advent of the Internet, and all its technological advancements, the government has been handed a most powerful tool in information gathering.
Recently, this was shown to be a good thing. A man suspected of a hit-and-run that killed a women was shown to have made Google searches for some very suspicious topics, including "auto glass reporting requirements to law enforcement," and "hit and run". He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.
But one can't help being left with the nagging question in their mind, are they keeping track of everything I'm searching?
The answer is simply, yes.
Surveillance Online
To appropriately understand surveillance, one need only think of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with its references to the ubiquitous Big Brother, watching over everyone’s actions at all times. Modern day surveillance can be observed in the plethora of CCTV cameras that blanket the nation, in our health files at the doctor’s office, or in our criminal records. But it is increasingly observable in the trail we leave behind on the Internet.
Google is Watching
Google states that it keeps track of every search query. Its privacy policy states: “our servers automatically record the page requests made when users visit our sites. These ‘server logs’ typically include your web request, Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser.”
In other words, Google keeps track of not only the search query, but the time of the search query, the IP address from which it was inputted, the language in which it was inputted and any other information it can gather. The company claims to simply be using this information to improve the quality of their services and “for other business purposes”. This information invariably leads users to the question of what protections they have against intrusions by the government into their use of Google services.
Google claims, in its privacy policy, that it does comply with valid legal process, like search warrants, court orders, or subpoenas seeking personal information. In other words, if the government wants any of the above information about anyone, and they have a reasonable reason for wanting it, there are means to obtain it.
Corporate Surveillance
The Internet has been, and continues to be a communal project. A very important idea behind the internet is that there is to be no global control at the operations level. However, recently big companies like Google and Facebook have been gaining increasing amounts of control over what happens online.
Using a technique called Data Mining, these Internet Goliaths discover hidden patterns and relationships between pieces of information in very large databases.
Using this technique, the statistics can be used to glean insight about individuals to which they themselves may not have been privy. When governments obtain this information, they are able to identify potential criminals and wrongdoers before the crimes have been committed.
This brings the idea of surveillance to a whole new level.
Keep an Eye
Rather than freaking out and hiding under our covers, it's best that citizens simply keep an eye out for these happenstances online. Google is in the news nearly every day, as is Facebook.
An informed citizen is an enlightened citizen. The internet remains in the control of its users, and they ought to work to retain this control. Internet surveillance is a reality but its reach is not unstoppable.
Spying: Who wins in the end?
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