The Hindu Business Line : Monitoring Net traffic

News has just trickled in, nearly five months after the event, that a former reporter for The Contemporary Business News was jailed in April 2005 for conveying State secrets to foreign Web sites. The journalist, Shi Tao, had been arrested in November 2004 after it was found that he leaked (through an e-mail) a government circular that had warned the media generally of possible `destabilisation' arising from the return of certain dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

In his defence, Tao, who received a 10-year sentence, maintained that the information that he shared was not top secret, as the Chinese officials claimed. Interestingly, he had been nailed on the basis of information furnished by the ISP who, in this case, was Yahoo! There is a debate whether Yahoo! was ethical in parting with the information relating to an e-mail sent by Tao, even if it had been requisitioned by law-enforcement authorities.

The second development is the UK Government's announcement of its resolve to act against those who either display violent pornography on the Internet or download such images.

A Consultation Paper released a few weeks ago contemplates making possession of images that portray violence during sexual activity an offence that will invite a minimum of three years in prison.

At present, a number of Web sites pander to this abnormal craving of individuals, and these are believed to lead to crime.

Significantly, the proposal is the logical culmination of a UK campaign carried on by Liz Longhurst that demanded a ban on such Web sites and required ISPs to block them. Longhurst is the mother of Jane Longhurst (31) who was raped and strangled by an acquaintance, Graham Coutts, in 2003. Coutts committed this cruel act within hours of viewing a Web site that catered to his obsession with necrophilia and asphyxial sex. A UK court convicted him in 2004 for a minimum period of 30 years in jail.

Normally, this move against depicting violence during sex should have been universally welcome. I am surprised that there is a small section that regards this as an unnecessary abridgement of the freedom of cyberspace. Times (August 31, 2005) columnist David Rowan raises the question: Who is to determine where `regular' pornography becomes `extreme'?

He also cites the lack of an international consensus on the definition of `obscenity' and the actual point at which an individual has to be restrained from viewing something that is `obscene'. More interestingly, Rowan believes that this is an impractical move because an average porno addict has easy access to technology that will still enable him to see what he wants on the Internet without getting caught by the authorities. This raises major issues of Internet vulnerability and security, and specifically how to prevent inroads by unscrupulous elements to peddle pornography by defeating technology that law enforcement employs.

The above developments are accompanied by a recent move by the UK Home Secretary to persuade members of the European Union to usher in law that would make it compulsory for ISPs to store all e-mail passing through them for a prescribed period. This suggestion has not yet been accepted. The Council of Europe Convention on cyber crime and the G8 nations generally support retention of such data for a mandatory period of time. The US Patriot Act 2001, passed in the wake of 9/11, amended the country's Cable Act to facilitate law enforcement agencies getting relevant traffic data whenever a cable company provides Internet services.

The trend, therefore, all over the world, is for governments to arm themselves with the authority to monitor what is passing through cyberspace, so that State security is not jeopardised, an individual's right to life is not violated and his sense of decency and morality is not outraged. This has raised the hackles of those who believe in the right to privacy and question the authority of governments to censor Internet traffic. As things stand now, the conflict may never be resolved.

The issue of strengthening Internet security becomes a mockery when law enforcement agencies want to get into that space and pry all the time on traffic that flows through it almost without interruption. Their resolve has become stronger with so much of the terrorist ideology being purveyed through new Web sites that surface almost every other day. In addition, law enforcement insists on keeping an eye on one-to-one communication that goes on between suspects. While computer professionals would like to bolster electronic security, the police would like to continually add to their equipment that will make cyber space porous.

The contradiction between the two objectives highlights the enormity of the tasks that face cyber security experts.

I would strongly commend readers to go through a brilliant paper on the subject (Politics of the Information Society: The bordering and restraining of global data flows) by Gus Hosein that was published by Unesco in 2004. In Hosein's view, technology will play a major role in enhancing or limiting the State's effectiveness to patrol the Internet. His lament is that the increasing emphasis on global security will heighten scepticism over the freedom of the Internet to purvey knowledge. While most of the harmful material may be kept away from vulnerable sections of the community that use the Internet, such as children, in the process, a lot of `non-indecent' content that could enrich the human mind will unwittingly get eliminated. This is the experience in China, a nation that has acquired tremendous expertise in filtering Internet content. (It has 80 million Internet users, a number that is next only to the US.) Ironically, this capacity has been built through technology bought from companies in the US, a country that all the time takes pride in its faith in freedom of speech and action!

(The writer is a former CBI Director, who is currently Adviser to Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.)

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