Internet monster devouring us

FAST-forward 40 years. It is November 2049 and privacy is a distant memory.
Every telephone call you make, every text you send on your mobile phone, every email and videocall, every financial transaction is recorded, stored, analysed and can potentially be used against you.
Each waking hour you are also deluged with marketing calls and sales pitches - which pop up on your mobile, your hand-held computer and even in your car.
The net, which turned 40 years old last week, is often touted as the ultimate tool of freedom and knowledge.
But in another 40 years time, will we still be celebrating this extraordinary electronic marvel - or rueing the creation of a monster? That is the troubling question being asked not just by technological luddites, but by the founders of the internet itself.
Although most people became aware of the net only in the early Nineties, the global 'network of networks has a history stretching back to the earliest days of computing.
The first network connection was made on October 29, 1969, when an undergraduate called Charley Kline attempted to make a computer in Los Angeles communicate with another computer at Stanford up the coast.
The first word communicated on the net was 'Lo - Kline was attempting to type the word 'Login when the system crashed.
They got it working again and, for nearly three decades, what became known as the 'internet (the actual term was first used in 1974) remained mostly a tool of academia and the military, gradually spreading its tentacles across the globe.
But then came the invention of the world wide web - the means by which anyone, anywhere could easily access this brave new online world.
This was the creation of British scientist Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, his Belgian colleague at the CERN nuclear research institute in 1989. Thanks to them, we are now in an age when it is almost impossible to imagine life without the net. With every passing year, its power and importance increases.
And herein lie the doubts of its founders.
For while the net has been championed as the ultimate expression of 'people power, there is a more sinister possibility. Its dominance in our lives has led its architects to fear it could be used as a weapon of intrusion, suppression and exploitation.
Already, anti-democratic regimes are increasingly subverting the openness of the net and using it as a weapon against their enemies.
Take China, which went online in 1993 and now has the greatest number of internet users of any nation - about a third of a billion. This phenomenal growth in internet use has been subsidised and encouraged by the Beijing regime. And yet despite the flow of countless terabytes of data, China is as far from being a democracy as it was at the time of the Tiananmen Square riots 20 years ago. Its a troubling paradox, but one explained by the very nature of what the internet actually does.
It has been joked that the one thing you need for a totalitarian state to work is a decent filing system. Indeed, it has been estimated that in East Germany, the Stasi secret police 'employed a third of the population to act as snoops on compatriots.
Now imagine that the Stasi had had access to Google.
As Robert Cailliau says: 'It would have been terrible. There would have been no need for a network of potentially unreliable human snoops; just a few servers quietly hooked up to everyones telephone lines and computers, monitoring their credit card usage and cross-matching it all with the pictures coming in from millions of CCTV cameras.
Cailliaus fears are echoed by Professor Peter Kirstein of University College London, the man responsible for bringing the first internet connection to Britain in the early Seventies.
'Once you have a universal medium like this, it is very hard to keep information about events hidden; to that extent, it is a great tool against oppression, he says.
'However, by the same token, it is very straightforward to build in monitoring facilities into the heart of the network, so that the authorities can discover where the information they dont like is coming from. In other words, far from empowering freedom-fighters, the web can be used to track them down easily and suppress them.
Professor Kirstein believes that in the future, there will be a constant battle, a kind of arms race between the authorities and the subversives - or oppressed.
Whether good or evil will be in the lead in 40 years time is anyones guess.
Yet Professor Cailliau believes there is an even graver threat from the net than totalitarian tyranny. He believes the 'really sinister stuff will come not from governments, but from big business. The trouble, he says, stems from the ease by which data can be gathered, processed and sold on. - Daily Mail