DARKMARK

governments to control it strengthen. Despite habitual protests by civil
servants and politicians that no such process is under way, the tortured
and slow death of Internet privacy in the West, especially in the United
Kingdom and the United States, is a sad – albeit visible – reality and
is probably inevitable.

The response to 9/11, in the name of combating terrorism, severely
curtailed our freedom from state interference on the Web. The main
tool in the US was the Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme,
although even the Bush administration, with its congenital tin ear,
eventually realised that the name had so many Orwellian associations
that it should be renamed the Terrorism Information Awareness
programme.

The TIA afforded DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and detection
wing, considerable access to data gleaned from private communications.
Although the programme was eventually closed down, many of its
powers were retained by government and distributed among different
agencies in the United States.

Elsewhere, in a landmark case, the Supreme Court consented to the
FBI deploying key-logger trojans onto the computers of suspects,
although under court supervision. This enabled the FBI to log every-
thing that the suspect would do on his computer, just as the cyber
criminal does when he infects a third-party computer with a key logger.
At the turn of the millennium the European Parliament confirmed the
existence of Echelon, the United States’s global spy programme that
is allegedly capable of homing in on digital communications anywhere
in the world.

In a directive issued under the UK’s presidency of the European
Union, Internet Service Providers in Europe were obliged to start
storing all computer traffic (this applies to mobile phones as well) for
between six months and two years – data that a variety of governmental
agencies can access under national legislation. If these moves towards
digital surveillance continue, Western governments (usually in the
name of anti-terrorism strategies and law enforcement) will be in an
ever better position to monitor the movements and habits of their
citizens.

Researchers at the London School of Economics best described our
chosen path. In June 2009 they asked the reader to imagine: