Prisoners of the Electronic Age

There's some pretty dodgy stuff circulating via the Internet, you know. And I don't mean Plasmatics lyrics and album details - for despite all their apparent presentational excesses, their message was as suitable for a Sunday sermon on modern-day society as it was at a rock concert! The Plasmatics as good old-fashioned "fire and brimstone" preachers? You read it here first!

No, what I mean is the way that all sorts of dangerous material can be broadcast via the Web. For example, some former employee of the security services gets pissed off for some reason, and decides to take some sort of revenge on his former employer by publishing details of Government spies and secret agents. Or some maniac tells people how to make some lethal poison that could kill millions of innocent people. Lets face it, most people are pretty sensible most of the time but many of us go a bit "Off the rails" sometimes - so society has traditionally structured itself to stop us doing too much damage when we do.

So why is it, with the enormous potential risks of heaven knows what information being spread by the bitter, the eccentric, the mad - or the plain evil - that Governments apparently encourage home computers and access to the Web? You see, it doesn't seem to make sense for them to allow such a thing, let alone encourage it. So we need, maybe, to look a little deeper and ask whether or not there could be some deeper reason why apparently unrestricted access to all sorts of strange information and ideas is being encouraged in most countries.

I suggest the explanation is that Governments see a bigger prize ahead. That pd= Is information about citizens, on a scale that is almost unimaginable. It began, probably, with credit cards in the I960s. They allow your purchases to be recorded, but much more than that - they track your movements. By means of fairly simple analysis, profiles can be built up of people, just from credit card purchases, that describe how they live in a great deal of depth. For example, where they live, where they go, what they buy, what music they like, what books they read, what clothes they wear, what clubs they join, where they were at particular times, and so on. And, when it is the norm to have such a card, not having one is maybe a sign of rebellion. You see the problem.

But credit cards were just the start. Vast amounts of data are being collected about citizens, on a scale that would have amazed Stalin. People accept it today because we live in the so-called Information Age. On street corners in England there are video cameras, monitoring people's movements. On the streets, other cameras record the movements of their cars. The only place where there is privacy is indoors. Until you pick up the phone, or use the Internet. For, at least in theory, all such electronic communications can be monitored too.

It's interesting to look at the remarkable cult TV series "The Prisoner' from the late I960s. Number Six, held captive in The Village by unknown masters, is watched using cameras, but not all the time. Guards, in a control room, observe the images. Most people would say "It couldn't work in real life, because you'd need far too many cameras and most of the population would have to he guards". But I think such a view is dangerously wrong. That's because of the almost unlimited power of the modern computer.

It's a fairly simple matter to introduce software that will recognise faces from camera-generated images; it doesn't need hundreds of guards armed with great volumes of "Mug shots" to do it, just some computer code. Once such software has be written, and it has, there is no stopping it - for by improving the computer programmes, file designs, indexes, processing power etc. it can be made to work in a split second and on a virtually unlimited scale.

Of course, the authorities justify this sort of thing, when they have to and that's not very often, on the grounds that "the innocent have nothing to fear from any of this". Hn~ ... well I guess that depends on how you define "innocent". When you consider that most people break laws every day (driving a bit too fast, parking where they shouldn't, reproducing images of the Plasmatics without getting approval to do so, and so on) you come to the view that none of us are truly "innocent". We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, sinners. The question, or at least one of the questions, is this: should our behaviour be controlled by our conscience, or by some kind of electronic guardian?

In "Man in the Long Black Coat" Bob Dylan wrote "Preacher was a - talkin, there's a sermon he gave, he said every man's conscience is vile and depraved, you cannot depend on it to he your guide, when ifs you who must keep it satisfied". Personally, I think that the human conscience is a deep and powerful thing; but if the Preacher was right, surely any system designed by corrupt and depraved humanity would inescapably reflect that corruption and depravity? For even if one were to postulate divine intervention, e.g. God- given Commandments on tablets of stone, innate human corruption and depravity would surely pervert their proper interpretation and use.

This reasoning leads me to the view that electronic guardians are not the solution. If human behaviour were controlled by such means, the role of conscience would be reduced. Free will would have been taken away. OK, I accept that a few more shoplifters would be caught, but maybe - when we lose our privacy - we are in a sense de-humanised.

So, back to the Internet. My suspicion is that monitoring Internet messages is actually very easy to do. After all, you only have to tap a telephone line or get into the ISP's mainframe. Search engines can easily monitor the data going up and down your connection. Maybe, looking for words like "Bomb", or "Nazi", or "Hitler" - you get the idea, I'm sure. Exactly the same sort of thing can be done with voice communication, but it's a bit harder because the words have to be converted into text using voice recognition software.

And who knows - maybe even THIS essay is being scrutinised by some sort of official? If so, here's a message for you - Bow Down and Pledge Allegiance!

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