Protecting Identity

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BOT - the danger zone:

What is a bot?

A bot (short for robot) is a robot without a body. Bots come in a dazzling variety.

Bots are cool, cruel, obedient, and wild. Bots are cyberspace's first indigenous species. These bots, mere strings of code, are now poised to change our lives. Bots are stand-ins for our drives and desires. They collect things for us. The do what we want them to do and what we don't want them to do. Bots will soon be as crucial to you as your car, your newspaper, your reference books, and your credit cards. Soon you will only be as good as you bot. This is the story of these software robots in all its quirkiness. From the trials and tribulations of artificial intelligence to the hilarious lifestyles of the first bots and the havoc they set in motion. Bots can be used in legitimate search for information, but bots can also be used in the illegal search for information, both uses are for the advantage of the user. Bots have also been used to overwhelm chat lines and other bots have been used to prevent chat lines from being abused and information from being illegally obtained. Bots are being used to make life more convenient as we are being drowned in a sea of information. Like it or not, bots are here. So meet your new servants... and tormentors.

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The Surveillance State?

introduction

The notion of the 'surveillance state' - claimed to be uniquely modern, both quantitatively and qualitatively different to past regimes - has been a major feature of recent debate about privacy, security and the governance of cyberspace. It has been reflected in claims that US citizens want protection from government more than from business and, more luridly, that 'secret governments' (an intelligence-industrial complex) shape public consciousness or render democratic governments irrelevant.

restricting access to information (official secrets), an important mechanism against moves to increase the accountability or efficiency of particular agencies, and
shaping public consciousness through disinformation and information overload
It responds to threats -

from groups (eg the International Workers of the World pre-1925, international/domestic Communism 1917-80s, stooges in the pay of the CIA, Islamic Jihad ...) or
technologies (the H Bomb, bioterror)
that either have a substantive basis or merely serve to legitimate the activities of particular agencies and elites. The 'death of distance' means that it blurs traditional demarcations between domestic/external agencies and about activities that seep across national/provincial borders. Some analysts have equated the surveillance state with imperialism or merely with 'late capitalism'.

An alternative view - for us more convincing - instead emphasises bureaucratic aggrandisement, the imperative to use new technologies (evident in much e-business) and the dilemmas of articulating and effectively responding to national security challenges, a task akin to pinning jelly to a moving wall.

Points of entry into the literature are William Staples' The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the United States (New York: St Martin's Press 1997), Policing Politics: Security Intelligence & the Liberal Democratic State (London: Cass 1994) by Peter Gill, Surveillance, Power & Modernity (Cambridge: Polity 1990) by Christopher Dandeker, The Rise of Computer State (New York: Vintage 1983) by David Burnham and The Electronic Eye: The Raising of Surveillance Society (Cambridge: Polity 1996) by David Lyon.

Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon 1988) offers a view from the left that to us is disturbingly ahistorical and elides crucial differences between totalitarian and more open states. It is complemented by Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice & Peace to Rid the World of Evil (New York: Palgrave 2003) or Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State & the Demise of the Citizen (New York: Palgrave 2000), James Bovard's equalling romantic views from the right, or by Robert Stove's quirky The Unsleeping Eye: A Brief History of Secret Police & Their Victims (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove 2002). The Intruders: Unreasonable Searches & Seizures from King John to John Ashcroft (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 2004) by Samuel Dash offers a US view.

For a perspective on tensions between democracy and security see Best Truth: Intelligence & Security in the Information Age (New Haven: Yale Uni Press) by Bruce Berkowitz & Allan Goodman and The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity 1987) by Anthony Giddens.

the secret state

For the NSA and affiliated 'e-int' agencies see James Bamford's Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century (New York: Doubleday 2002) and The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1982), Deep Black. Space Espionage and National Security (New York: Random 1986) by William Burrows and the classic The Codebreakers (New York: Macmillan 1972) by David Kahn.

There's a somewhat breathless acount in Total Surveillance: Investigating the Big Brother World of E-Spies, Eavesdroppers & CCTV (London: Piatkus 2000) by John Parker and Bits, Bytes & Big Brother: Federal Information Control in the Technological Age (New York: Praeger 1995) by Shannon Martin. Arthur Miller's The Assault on Privacy Computers, Data Banks, Dossiers (Ann Arbor: Uni of Michigan Press 1971) and Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 1996) edited by David Lyon & Elia Zureik remain of significance.

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Censorship, for many people, begins at school.

It encompasses restrictions on what students can say (often the same restrictions facing other members of society but seen as problematical because students have a special dispensation to question and provoke before they enter adulthood).

It encompasses restraints on what is taught and how that matter is taught, with for example debate in the US and elsewhere about the place of 'intelligent design' in a science curriculum and about 'political correctness'.

It also encompasses debate about student access to particular texts - earlier pages of this guide noted that classics have been bowdlerised or suppressed - and to online content in wired schools.

More insidiously, it encompasses evident and covert surveillance of teachers and students.

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Broadcast censorship in advanced democratic economies has centred on three notions.

1.The first is that broadcast media are uniquely powerful, profoundly seductive and thus need discrete regulatory regimes under spe******t agencies such as the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Australian Communications & Media Authority (ACMA). That is in contrast to the non-electronic mass media, where for example few nations have a government agency specifically concerned with newspaper, magazine and book publishing.

2. The second is that radiofrequency spectrum is a scarce resource, to be administered in the public interest. Broadcasters are either state owned (and therefore subject to government policies on broadcast content/styles) or are licensed by the government. By the 1990s licensing in most of the economies involved substantial self-regulation, with commercial and non-commercial private sector broadcasters self-censoring.

That self-censorship generally has involved industry codes covering types of content, language and scheduling of transmissions (eg prohibitions on broadcast of 'adult' content during times when minors are likely to be watching. US broadcasting for several years included a ban on the so-called Pacifica 7, ie seven profanities.

Typically the codes have reflected film rating schemes (ie parental advisories) and included outright bans on broadcast of particular content.

Although the withdrawal of licenses is extremely rare, the significant investment in individual licenses, talent and networks (we've for example noted the vicissitudes of Australian radio network owners who overpaid for assets during the 1980s radio boom) means that broadcasters tend to be cautious.

3. The third notion is that broadcasting is 'democratic' - since the 1970s accessible to most consumers in advanced economies - and dissimilar to older media that can be physically quarantined (eg restricted to a red light district, under a counter or in a closed library stack) or restricted by price (the traditional control mechanism for erotic/subversive literature) or can be partly managed through restrictions on sale (eg prohibitions on sale to minors of some recordings and imprints).

US academic Jonathan Ezor that

codes of practice

Co-regulatory regimes have typically featured formal codes of practice, of varying specificity and endorsement by the government agency that licenses use of radiofrequency spectrum.
Such codes are generally exclusive, for example prohibiting advertising of contraception or promotion of illicit drug use but not offering a 'right of reply' or in practice much more than tokenistic 'equal air time' for community groups/causes.