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Case Study: PRIVACY ON THE INTERNET
- An estimated 200 million people worldwide send and receive
emails each day
- The British Government has increased police powers to detect
crime in the new digital age. Critics claim the individual's
right to privacy could be harmed.
Analysis
New technology poses new challenges, just as it offers criminals
new opportunities. In turn, the police and security services
feel they have a legitimate interest in collecting information
that may lead them to detect serious crime.
In the past post office "snoopers"
developed techniques to open and secretly reseal envelopes.
These days an email can be read or copied without the sender
or recipient knowing.
In its efforts to detect crime over the Internet,
the British government introduced the Regulation of Investigatory
Powers Act in July 2000. Under the Act, Internet Service Providers
(ISPs) linking computers with the Internet can be forced to
install "black boxes" which would allow security forces
to monitor e-mail messages.
The authorities could also force individuals
and companies to decode encrypted messages or face prosecution.
Critics fear this gives security forces powers
to snoop on British citizens using the Internet that are "unprecedented
in peacetime". The British government has admitted that
the new law might result in information being inadvertently
collected about innocent citizens, but that it is necessary
to track, trace and tap high-tech criminals who are using the
Internet.
The UK is not alone in this controversial
subject. The FBI has revealed that it is using a snooping system
called 'Carnivore', which can collect and sift through hundreds
of e-mails.
Carnivore piggybacks on the network run by
Internet service providers and scans all incoming and outgoing
email of people under surveillance.
Civil liberty groups decried the existence
of Carnivore, saying it violates FBI operating rules that demand
it only spies on named targets and does not carry out "trawling"
operations.
As technology develops, it is clear that the
right to privacy enshrined in Article 12 increasingly will be
at the centre of debate.
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