The internet is one of the most useful tools if not one of the most popular tools on the planet to gather and share information of facts and opinions. There are millions of websites that offer a wide range information on any topic you can think of, yet as time goes on the internet grows and with it, its users. As its users grow in numbers, so do its opinions on important topics. Increasingly over the past few years its users and governments have been clashing more and more on their opinionated views of privacy on the internet. An example of this is that polls conducted on the public in America show a trend that suggests that 60% of Americans are against NSA spying (Jaycox). Privacy is of big concern on the internet because its users want the ability to share their beliefs free from being discriminated against. Governments and big corporations on the other hand have the opposite view trying to push internet bills to be passed in congress that limit the sharing of information freely.
Furthermore information has become a valuable commodity that many websites are collecting without the consent or knowledge of its users. According to a website (“EPIC – Public Opinion on Privacy”) 59% of people asked, had no idea that websites were collecting information based on their visitations and what they click on online. So much so that because of the tracking websites will tender their information to different types of people essentially building a profile of that user to use for different types of gains. I think that information should not be tracked without the knowledge of the user. Bills that the government use as a way of allowing themselves and websites to track your habits is an unjustified way of collecting personal information.
A Rise in Internet Activism
2012-2014 has been the years of increasingly vocal internet activists. At the start, the government had proposed 2 bills called PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) which are very similar to what they propose yet have had an immense reaction from online users of the internet. Both bills propose (“Why Should You Fear SOPA and PIPA?”) the granting of power to stop piracy from any website through copyright infringement. The bills were supposed to be imposed to try to stop the piracy of movies and such through torrenting websites and yet as a consequence would affect millions of others not involved with torrenting. Essentially for example, if a website such as a blog poster posts some bit of information or picture they got off of another website then the owner’s website can claim an infringement of intellectual property rights to the Department of Justice. This in-turn would grant the Department of Justice the right to take down that website by requiring the DNS (Domain Name Server) to be shut down (“Why Should You Fear SOPA and PIPA?”).
The problem is that the government should not be able to dictate and police what is acceptable to be on the internet. Although government agencies have proposed bills limiting Internet privacy and piracy, the increasing amount of illegal activity poses an increasingly strong argument to pass them. This article looks to expand on the reader’s knowledge of why internet policing could be a problem and yet could also be an area of aid in increasing the safety of its users and the population of the world. In this article I will argue that while it is not right that the government is allowed to police the internet, I think that it is equally important to understand that there are far more negative aspects to be focusing on and clearing up. I first will be talking about the rise in activism and how it has influenced the public’s view on privacy on the internet especially hacktivist groups. Then I will be talking about the illegal activities on the web that are intertwined with privacy and the government taking down websites. Lastly I will be exploring the aspect of big corporations such as Facebook and Google tracking the public’s usage. Furthermore I will arrive at my conclusion that letting the government police the internet is a part of an invasion of what the internet stands for in its very nature- a free platform to voice any opinion.
The proposal of these internet bills gained a lot of traction from internet hacktivists who were very concerned about the negative impacts on the internet should the bills pass. A hacktivist is, according to Cambridge Dictionaries Online, “Someone who uses computers to try to achieve political change” (“Hacktivist – Definition in the Business English Dictionary – Cambridge Dictionaries Online (US)”). One of a number of famous people to take a stand against this bill is Aaron Swartz. During a video on Democracynow.org Swartz makes an interesting point on these bills (Swartz). “ …healthcare, financial reform, those are the issues I work on. Not something obscure like copyright law. … (Peter) It is a bill about the freedom to connect”. This quote has a very important meaning as it shows how uninterested Swartz was with even knowing the basics about the laws that were proposed to pass. In the beginning he did not even want to be concerned with the law because he thought it was insignificant, yet when having someone explain it (Such as peter) to him, Swartz finally realized that this law is way more important than he anticipated. I think this meaning applies very well to all the people who don’t think that this bill is important. Like in the video, this bill is often being overlooked without a deeper thought to what the future could entitle if these bills were to pass. I think the general public need to understand that, as Swartz said “ This bill [SOPA] would let the government devise a list of websites that Americans were not allowed to visit” (Swartz), and that by giving it a little thought, could understand that this is essentially an invasion of our freedom and privacy.
Alternatively, it is not just governments that we should be conscious about policing the internet to their best interest. I think we should also be cautious about internet hacktivist groups trying to police the internet for the “better good” by importing their own morals into how they go about taking off websites or hacking into emails because they think it is the right thing to do. A hacktivist group called CyberAngels has around 1000 members who work in Internet Relay Chat, Usenet, WWW, and America Online and are supposedly promoting netiquette which is according to an article “is the collection of common rules of polite conduct” (Wall). “They claim the right to question, what they see and argue that they have a civil, legal and human right to bring it to the attention of the proper authorities” (Wall) which in essence means that they are governing what people could do on these areas of the internet based on their own morals. This may not seem like a bad idea, yet it is exactly the same thing that the government are trying to do by passing these bills that infringe on our privacy.
A more serious hacktivist group that is well known for hacking into government and big companies such as Sony’s emails to try to expose them is called Anonymous. It is not only the government that is trying to infringe on our privacy, but also hacktivist groups that think they are doing something that helps the overall internet integrity. On November 5, 2012 anonymous was responsible for hacking into PayPal and releasing 27,935 PayPal users personal information (Ashe). Furthermore even before, Anonymous used a DDOS attack in 2010 to attack PayPal and bring down the website because PayPal refused to accept donations to the WikiLeaks PayPal account (Musil). How is this any different or better than the government proposing the bills to limit our privacy when we having this hacktivist group that is supposedly doing these things for the greater good? This in essence, is the same thing as the government limiting our access to certain websites. Only instead of the government, we get a group of people who have the power to infringe and leak thousands of people’s personal information that could be used for malicious intent. We should be worried about stopping these powerful groups and not so much about the government. Yet on the other hand it is not only hacktivist groups we should be keeping an eye out for, it is also the public and the illegal activities happening on the surface and a hidden internet web that we should watch out for.
Would the Internet be a Better Platform if it Would be Allowed to be Policed by Government Agencies and What are the Consequences? 