Big Brother and Your E-mail

Threats to email privacy             Aeon Skoble is a visiting professor of philsosphy at West Point.

Big Brother Wants to Read Your E-mail by Aeon J. Skoble [From The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, November, 1999, p. 33. The full text of this article can be found through a link at the end of the article. Note that the FBI has continued its campaign to monitor email with its Carnivore project.] Some people concerned about privacy violations on the Internet object that many Web site operators collect and use information about visitors for demographic research and, yes, advertising. Although "anonymizer" services are available, the simplest way to preserve one's privacy from such operators is simply to refrain from visiting their sites. After all, no one forces you to buy books and CDs online. If you want anonymity, go to a store and pay cash. A more serious and unavoidable matter is the government's newest scheme for invading everyone's online privacy. In late July, the Clinton administration unveiled a new plan to use the FBI to monitor all Internet traffic, both on military and nonmilitary networks, under the guise of protecting the nation from terrorists who might use the Net for nefarious purposes. According to a draft of the plan, a sophisticated monitoring system would be put in place to constantly track all computer activity, looking for "suspicious patterns." This would help keep tabs on the activities of the usual suspects: drug traffickers, child molesters, and terrorists. Of course, while that sounds like a reasonable precaution, the potential for abuse is both grave and apparent. The government could monitor political dissidents as easily as it could monitor actual criminals. Any system that enables the authorities to track anyone enables them to track everyone. All electronic commerce and banking, all Web visits, and all e-mail communication would be potentially available for surveillance. This would include the retrieval of passwords for remote log-in. The director of the plan, Jeffrey Hunker of the National Security Council, claims he will make an effort to protect privacy rights. It is not unreasonable to wonder if this is actually a real priority for him. Two Threats There are two distinct threats to individual liberties here. First, with this powerful surveillance tool, government's snooping power would grow astronomically. Unlike with wiretaps, Big Brother wouldn't even need a court order to check up on anyone it wanted to investigate. Second, besides government abuse, we would have to worry about the tool being used by others who could illicitly get access to the information either through bribery or hacking. Predictably, the government claims that it is not interested in eavesdropping, but only searching for patterns that might indicate illegal activity. But what does that mean?... [To see the rest of the article go to http://www.fee.org/ and scroll to the bottom of the page. Since the article is not on the FEE web site, you need to click the link to the FolioViews InfoBase of past Freeman and Ideas on Liberty articles. At the FolioViews interface, choose the year 1999 and then November and then the article beginning, "Big Brother...".