I continue to be amazed at the number of people who still seem
to think that using the internet somehow hides their real identity. We
are all aware of censorship in a number of countries and, on the whole,
abhor it, although, in the face of hacking attacks and abusive social
networking site trolling, it is very difficult to find black and white. There
is currently a movement in India for example against Draconian use of
their Information Technology Act which was seemingly designed to prevent
abusive e-mails and blasphemous websites. No
one, except the most liberal, would argue with such aims, but of course
interpretation of ‘blasphemous’ always causes problems and now the
blocking of websites has extended to all those featuring pirated
material, which has effectively prevented access to legitimate material
too. Not such a good censorship, perhaps.
But it is the use of social networking sites to exchange messages with friends and relatives that staggers me. Do
people not use telephones any more? Recently television presenter,
Melanie Sykes, began tweeting a new beau, Jack Cockings, after he posted
a picture of himself naked. Melanie responded by posting a pic of herself in lingerie and they then progressed into exchanges of sexually explicit tweets. It
took a message from an outsider (‘Get a room you two.’) to bring them
to their senses and presumably make them realise that they were not the
only two reading these messages. Duh.
More
deliberately, the messy divorce of the two banking heirs, Ben Goldsmith
and Kate Rothschild looked like it was being played out over the
internet, until someone, presumably Daddies, pointed out that this may
not be the best publicity for either of them (leave alone for the
banks). These are all intelligent individuals, sorry, I mean ‘educated’.
But, in what I think may prove to be truly a landmark action, a Brighton lady has been granted Court permission to seek out the identities of internet trolls who targeted her. The
police have not been keen to put resources into such actions before,
but with a Court ruling that an offence may have been committed, they
might now themselves target abusive internet users. I
hope they do and I hope that this activity also removes the demands for
further censorship in this country. No one should be allowed to hide
behind an alias like, er, nomadtraveller.
Finally,
one area where the police do pursue persons on the internet is where
larger crimes might have taken place, such as fraud. Thus a recent organised crime case of identity theft on a massive scale was successfully shut down and the perpetrators jailed. Jolly good! But,
and I revert to my first statement, why did this gang think that they
could advertise on the internet and that only criminals would see their
website? Yes, the whole point of a website is to advertise to as wide
an audience as possible. In fact they seem to have been quite
successful for a while, but they know now how public the internet is. So do Melanie Sykes and Jack Cockings. And so do Ben Goldsmith and Kate Rothschild. So, only 50 million people to go then.
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