Privacey and freedom on the internet.

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Privacey

You may be a stranger to the Internet, the main artery on the so-called information superhighway. You may not even know what the Internet really is or how it works. You may not even own or use a computer. But even if you don’t know a modem from a mouse, the Internet knows you. Probably better than you care to be known.

If you have ever applied for a driver’s license, worked for the government, gone to college, married, purchased insurance, paid taxes or even just seen a doctor, the Internet system of computer networks, often referred to as “cyberspace,” probably contains information about you — detailed information which you probably assumed was cloaked with some sort of privacy or limited in distribution to those for whom you volunteered the information.

Guess again. More likely than not, transactions involving you have found their way without your knowledge or consent to one or more of the thousands of computer networks linked through the omnipresent Internet.

The Internet may contain the most personal of records, such as those maintained by physicians and hospitals. Easy access to that data through computers is supposed to be good for the patient, by furnishing rapid availability in the event of an emergency far from home, quick test results, speedier diagnosis and treatment, and lower medical costs due to rapid exposure of fraudulent insurance claims and avoiding duplicative procedures.

take the man in California who is neither homosexual nor HIV-infected, yet found himself the unwitting victim of a mistaken report in a computer database that said he was both. Through the Internet, the information was soon accessible to thousands of people and conceivably already in their hands before the error was discovered. Suddenly the spectre of discrimination was present and real, all based on falsehoods proliferated essentially automatically throughout the networks of the Internet. Almost immediately, he was unable to get health or disability insurance. Worse still, he is finding it impossible to get the false report expunged from the database and a correction issued. Even if he does succeed in deleting the false information, the falsehoods already have spread far and wide.

Easy access certainly has its advantages. A serious researcher can reduce by an entire generation the time involved ferreting out extant data on his or her subject. Scientific or humanistic results can be published years earlier because of the data retrieval features of the information superhighway. Lives can be saved, frontiers explored and global communication established.

Users in dozens of countries on every continent — even Antarctica — rely on the Internet as a computerized means to exchange information, receive and send electronic mail, transfer files, conduct business, obtain computer entertainment and news, keep track of their finances and their favorite television shows, shop for clothes, music and even food, participate in special interest computer discussion groups, and on and on and on.

But the Internet’s promise of the information superhighway is tempered by perils and temptations for the unscrupulous. For decades, the abuse of computerized information has been of major concern to civil libertarians, and today, after such dramatic advances in both telecommunications and computers, the problem has reached Orwellian proportions. Damaging information can reach 30 million computer users in a matter of hours. Recourse, if any, is difficult, incomplete and often insubstantial.

For all its seeming complexity, the Internet is actually remarkably simple, and each month, between 3 million and 6 million computer users enter the network for the first time. If the telecommunications companies realize their goals, it will be accessible through home television sets in the very near future.

But just as television was not readily understood when it emerged from laboratories and into living rooms some 50 years ago, the Internet, which is unlike any medium seen before, can seem abstract and unfathomable to the uninitiated. But even as television redefined entertainment, the Internet is poised to redefine not only entertainment, but also information, communication and commerce. Even the way each of us conducts the routines of our daily lives.

For anyone seeking instant access to information, broadly accessible on-line computer networks are a fantastic boon: They are widely contributed to, provide a vast array of information — at low cost — and are constantly changing and expanding and available almost everywhere.

On the verge of the 21st century, computer networks such as the ubiquitous Internet and a host of others have been established worldwide for those who seek such access and opportunity.

But a dark side to the on-line world has emerged. Such services have become a haven for a phenomenon which, until recently, was virtually untouched by regulation or moderation in this field: “pirating” — infringement of copyrighted or otherwise protected works, ranging from book reviews to software, in spite of the clear law prohibiting such acts in any other medium. “The quantity of information that can be stolen or the amount of damage that can be caused may be limited only by the speed of the network and the criminal’s equipment,” according to Scott Charney, chief of the Computer Crime Unit of the Department of Justice.

To pirates, who often appear and disappear anonymously, these on-line services provide immunity from the legal and ethical restraints that prohibit such activities in newspapers, magazines, radio, television or public speech. In short, pirates exploit such systems to get away with lawless conduct which they never could get away with outside the cyberworld. For their victims — creators of original, protected works — these on-line services pose a constant threat of theft and economic loss.

As Professor I. Trotter Hardy of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, put it, “Anonymity is power, and I think it will be abused on the Net.”

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The problem of piracy is serious and growing. Recently, the head of a software piracy ring invited a Los Angeles Times reporter into her home to watch the ringleader lift a new, expensive computer game from LucasArts Entertainment Company, with help from a paid inside saboteur. Using the Internet, the pirate next linked up with a programmer in Moscow who cracked the code, making it possible to play the game without an owner’s manual. The game was posted on a Seattle-based bulletin board through the Internet — days before its official release. Anyone who accessed it conveniently avoided the ...

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