Governments have always wanted to monitor what their populations are doing, and the internet brings new opportunities and new problems. Surveillance is much easier in cyberspace than in the real world, but much web material is just about communicating what happens in the real world. This can be immensely damaging to governments, as the US authorities found with the Abu Ghraib photographs.
Steve Mann has pioneered the uses of sousveillance which can turn the spotlight onto the authorities themselves. Witness the recent controversy surrounding the video of Los Angeles Police brutality posted on YouTube. Mann terms this “watchful vigilance from underneath”, which has powerful democratic implications.
China has one of the largest online populations in the world and has a whole police department dedicated to web surveillance. The so-called Great Firewall of China censors what people see using technology built in to the country’s basic net infrastructure. More sophisticated firewall technology spots when people are searching the web for particular words and hijacks their session to stop them getting the information. Censorship is generally discouraged in western democracies, but that doesn’t mean nobody cares about internet use. In fact some people couldn’t care more, as Bill Thompson documents for the BBC in an excellent article “Who is watching the watchers?“
Take MySpace as an example. Extensive file-filtering scans old and new content to weed out any copyrighted material, while Wired reports US police automatically trawled through MySpace accounts finding 744 known sex offenders. Like other social networking sites, MySpace also serves as real-life electronic panopticon environment for the security services looking for evidence of subversives.
