Will Britain Authorize Police Surveillance of the Internet?

First, the spin-free facts: Police and government law enforcement agencies have been watching the Internet, and treating online communication as a source of tips and clues, since Microsoft started building in Internet access software--if not longer. If you have in fact committed a crime, posting about it, even on the "friends only" side of your Facebook page, is a good way to avail yourself of whatever your government may be offering in the way of, er, "help."

Britain's MI5, however, is proposing to go a step further, systematically monitoring all those fun social sites that insist that everybody at least claim to be using their real names and addresses...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-and-mi5-get-power-to-watch-you-on-the-web-7606788.html

Hazards of this kind of surveillance? Well...my feelings are mixed, actually, because governments hire hackers who've been tapping into the allegedly private and friends-only sides of many online services for a long time. Knowing that MI5, or the FBI, or whatever your country may have in place of those, may be using the Internet to find out how late your last utility payment was, how whiny your excuse for making the payment so late was, how many different people have been receiving your "intimate romantic" text messages, and so on, is actually a gain. They've been doing that; it's just that they've been doing it only sporadically, only when Zeke the Geek stumbled across something of interest to his employers, in the course of his routine private hacking, which, you may not have realized, is what he's been doing ever since grade eight, when he became bored with the low intellectual level of prime-time TV. If they do it officially, you will lose whatever privacy you may hitherto have enjoyed during the "Jeopardy" show.

Once again, this website recommends never "telling" a computer anything you wouldn't want to read in the newspaper. Promote your business, publish your poems, and comment on the daily news, in cyberspace. Pay your bills and carry on your private conversations in real life.