Is the Internet itself a surveillance tool?

The revelations in recent months about government surveillance has shocked people here and abroad. Besides the NSA, the most recent one is that the DEA Special Operations Division fishes the internet and cellphone conversations, and when it hears something incriminating or suspicious, passes it onto the appropriate local agency to then find evidence of the crime and hide where the investigation originated. This "investigation laundering" totally turns the 4th Amendment and the concept of “probable cause” on its head, and its done for criminal cases, not terrorists, not national security. It denies people a fair trial in several ways, one being that they can't confront their accusers.

There are reports of other government agencies scrambling to get their hands NSA information for use. I don't blame them. Let's face it. If the government is allowed to gather such information-- if anybody is-- the question of using it becomes moot. The temptation would be too strong, because it would be idiocy not to use it. Especially in moralistic “equivalent of” wars like the War on Drugs. If it's such a high moral cause, as the government treats it, what possible excuse is there to not use it?


This issue of surveillance has not peaked yet. Paranoia is always on the fringes, but when there's an indisputable conspiracy like this one affecting the entire population, paranoia takes time to build up. Then, if its not relieved by-- perhaps--the government shutting it down, people begin to do crazy things out of fear and rage. Such as that Chief of Police in Gilberton, Pennsylvania who has a private militia put his town under martial law. That kind of crazy. This tension can only build.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories.  Oswald shot JFK. Contrails are contrails. Al Qaeda pulled off 9/11 (though shocking government dereliction went right to very top, perhaps by Neocon design?).

Blatantly false conspiracy theories are usually formed by reversing the arrow of inference. For example, if there's a government conspiracy, you might expect to see buildings getting demolished by planes. You might see silver liquid pouring out of one of the structures. Certain unusual things might happen, such as an adjoining building collapses without apparent physical cause. However, if all of those happen, that doesn't mean there's a government conspiracy. 

Notwithstanding my general skepticism, in this widening surveillance scandal, there's a more troubling issue that needs to be examined: is the Internet itself designed specifically to be a surveillance tool?

There's no evidence of this yet, but the suspicion should be examined. It's common knowledge that the Internet came from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Originally, the idea was to come up with an uninterruptible communications network in the case of nuclear war. As anyone in the US knows from their ISP service, the “uninterruptible” part either never panned out, or was abandoned before the Internet became commercial. So, what was it meant to be when applied to civilian life? It's totally believable that the advantage to the Military Industrial Complex was seen as widespread surveillance from the time the Web became commercial and civilian.

This is hard to contemplate now that our lives are so intertwined with the Internet, but maybe we should rethink it. Maybe the totally free flow of information it isn't such a good idea, and maybe it doesn't level power in society.

Maybe lack information isn't the problem, maybe it's the disparity in socioeconomic power that needs to be addressed first, and the Internet just aggravates it? Fact is, the “free-flow of information” from the Internet is totally dependent on the tools to store and retrieve it. The people with the best tools control the information. This would, of course, be the people and social entities that have the most money. Why does it work like this? An inescapable fact is that in the Information Age, the human mind still limits us the most. It's by far, the slowest thing in the process, and multitasking has turned out to be a myth. So, in creating a huge pool of information, we didn't level access to it, we set up a gold rush for it.

But in this current climate, the question comes back to whether the people who turned DARPA's technology civilian planned for it to be for surveillance? Because it certainly is effective for spying on people. I remember the original appeal of the Internet was it's apparent anonymity. Because of that, you could have conversations you could never have with friends or family.

If they make the technology as a surveillance trap,  the growing scandal around snooping is just the end result of subversive plans that might have gone back as far as the early 90s. Right now, my suspicions are just a good, imaginative work of fiction. However, there's also nothing that makes it implausible. The Net is riddled with security problems, and maybe that's no accident.

This would mean we would have to completely rethink the direction our society has taken in the last twenty years. If the government can spy on such a scale, it can also censor on an enormous scale, for example, e-books. What's to stop the government, or some other entity, from introducing a piece of malware that searches for a certain excerpt of text and changes or deletes it anywhere the malware spreads to? With books now being primarily electronic, it becomes possible to alter or forge most copies of all kinds of documents.

Yes, we should really rethink what we're doing with information technology and consider doing more, and definitely keep more on paper records.  Of course, the surveillance isn't only on the Internet. It's also on cellphones, which, it just so happens, began to become available at the same time the Internet did.

If this were a novel, that would be proof of the conspiracy. In the real life, it's just intriguing. The Intrigue Age might be the right term for the world after Snowden.