Monday, October 19, 2009

Top Internet Hazards to Civil Liberties




On some extreme occasions, government measures and private sector measures threaten the civil liberties of a majority of Americans. These are the top internet hazards that government agencies do and major corporations do that could make the internet an ugly scene.

1. Warrantless Government Monitoring. Since the 9/11 attacks, the government has resorted to wiretapping of all internet traffic on all internet service providers. Without any warrants, the internet service providers are required to give out information to the National Security Agency.

2. Private Censorship. Companies censor information that the public have the right to know. Wikipedia, which is supposed to be an open reference for all people is misused by some unreliable sources to give out the wrong information.Some of the untrustworthy information range from commercial content used to market products to media sources that mislead people.

3. Government Censorship. China, Burma, North Korea, Vietnam, Egypt,
Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Cuba and Tunisia are a few of the countries who restrict internet access and even prosecute users based on what they post online.

4. Deep Packet Inspection. A lot of US internet service providers are now inspecting packets and therefore files that users send and receive. Some ad agencies are even paying the ISPs to eavesdrop on users.

5. ISP Tiered Pricing. Originally formulated to allow low-income users to avail of internet services by measuring charges based on bandwidth used, this scheme could be used to easily boost profits for the internet service providers and charge anybody without limit.

6. Record labels and ISPs banning users who share copyrighted music. This is pretty self explanatory and in a profit driven world, users who post and express their love of music by posting a favorite tune on the internet could be asked to get ugly consequences.

So if sometimes the government and the private sector cannot protect our civil liberties it would not hurt if we take action ourselves. Getting the right history eraser, history cleaner, internet eraser, internet cleaner, tracks eraser, tracks cleaner, computer history eraser and internet privacy software like Winclear could be a lifesaver in this day and age.

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