No 18. August 2001.
https://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1801rc.html
© Roger Clarke

The last 50 years has seen very substantial application of the technologies of personal and mass surveillance. The next two decades may see technologies of identification, and of location and tracking, destroy individual freedoms.

Running counter to those tendencies are new forms of networking that have been enabled by the Internet. These have created the possibility of enhanced freedom and power for individuals and social groups.

Government authorities and corporations, however, are implementing a substantial counterreformation. This is designed to overcome the potential for net-based freedoms and to ensure the maintenance and enhancement of social control. This paper investigates the dimensions of the current struggle.

• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Liberating Potentials of New Network Forms
  • 2.1 Early Computing and Communications Technologies
  • 2.2 The Internet of the Mid-1990s
  • 2.3 The Internet's Architecture
  • 2.4 Concurrent Developments in Liberating Technologies
  • 2.5 The Shared Hallucination That Is Cyberspace
  • 2.6 The Digital Era's Promise of Freedoms
• 3. The Denial of Freedoms Through the Re-Imposition of Social Control
  • 3.1 Shortpayments on the Promises
  • 3.2 Downsides of the Digital Era
  • 3.3 Challenges to Governments
  • 3.4 Challenges to Powerful Corporations
  • 3.5 Concurrent Developments in the Technologies of Surveillance
  • 3.6 Measures to Defeat Internet-Induced Freedoms
• 4. The Scope for Anti-Authoritarian Countermeasures
• 5. Conclusions and Prognosis
• Bibliography
• Underlying Resources
  
  

The advent of the open, public Internet during the 1990s was greeted with unbridled enthusiasm by a great many people. It was perceived to embody enormous potential to enhance the social, the political and the economic dimensions of people's lives.

But freedoms are utilised for many different purposes. Some are largely good; some are largely bad; and most can be argued to be either. The Internet quickly came to be used for old crimes and old misdemeanours, for new crimes and new misdemeanours, and for communications whose content was not to the taste of society's official and unofficial moral guardians. From an untrammelled 'idea in good standing', the Internet came to be seen as 'a mixed blessing'.

Meanwhile, giants were awakening from their slumbers. Any major change has losers as well as winners, and an array of powerful organisations came to the realisation that the losers could well include them. Considerable efforts have been invested during the last few years to rein in the Internet's liberating potentials.

The purpose of this paper is to document the rise and imminent fall of the freedom-enhancing Internet, and provide access to resources that expand upon this vital issue.

The first section of the paper identifies the ways in which the new network forms create possibilities for enhancement of freedoms. It provides an outline of the arrangements by which computers are linked. Although this may seem a narrow and technical topic, it is actually enormously important to an understanding of the Internet's impacts on power relations within social and economic combines. Other aspects of 'the digital revolution' are highlighted. This provides the foundations for a brief discussion of the experiences that people have when they use the net. The section concludes by identifying the many different kinds of freedoms that the Internet appeared to offer in the mid-to-late 1990s.

The second section of the paper explores the counterreformation that has been stimulated by the exercise of those freedoms. Powerful institutions perceive their interests to be harmed by a wide range of practices and potentials. There has been a vast increase in the number and the power of surveillance technologies during the last half-century. The paper examines ways in which those institutions are conducting multi-pronged counterattacks against many aspects of the Internet and its use.

Finally, the paper considers ways in which these authoritarian tendencies might be resisted, and concludes with a less-than-confident view of the survival prospects of the freedoms that we have come to enjoy.

The first part of the paper reviews the nature of the Internet, the services it supports, and the virtual communities and societies that use it, and identifies the freedoms it was perceived to be ushering in.

Computers were invented around 1940, and initially intended to perform rapid computation. Their numerical processing capabilities were augmented with data storage, and they have been applied to the processing of administrative data since 1952. Initially, computers were independent of one another. Data was captured in machine-readable form and fed into the machine. The output consisted of processed data in both machine-readable form (for reuse in subsequent operations), and in human-readable form.

The impact of standalone computing was to reinforce centralisation, hierarchy, authority, and supplier power. This was an excellent fit to the Cold War era. Not only communist but also 'free world' governments were concerned about national security and control over information. Computing was intrinsically authoritarian and freedom-threatening (Thompson 1970, Miller 1972, Rule 1974, Rodota 1976, Roszak 1986, Clarke 1988, Clarke 1994b).

From the mid-1960s onwards, electronic communications converged with computing. The initial applications sustained the centralist model, because they were shaped like a star, with a powerful computer at the hub and mere 'dumb terminals' at the extremities.

The progressive miniaturisation of processors, however, combined with mass production efficiencies, resulted in the availability of small devices which had increasingly significant processing capabilities. It is even arguable that the advent of the personal computer (PC) made the end of the Soviet Union inevitable. (In order to continue competing with the West, the Soviets had to harness their people's creativity and effort, which meant that PCs had to proliferate; but PCs, much more so than photocopiers before them, were samizdat presses. The truth would inevitably out, and the lies on which the regime was built would bring it down. Other authoritarian states such as Cuba and Vietnam have not felt the same need to compete, and hence have not succumbed. China has only recently eased its opposition to capital-driven economic development, and is already feeling the pressure.)

Through the 1980s, connections were achieved among the proliferating PCs. These linkages were used primarily by technology enthusiasts and social activists, and depended on clumsy one-to-one connections over voice-grade telephone lines. During the course of a mere decade, the links were upgraded to more sophisticated technologies and topologies. Relatively small numbers of computers in fairly close proximity to one another were linked using local area networks (LANs). Connections among greater numbers of computers over longer distances were supported by wide-area networks (WANs). Centralisation gave way to dispersion, and hierarchy and authority were challenged. Supplier power migrated from the manufacturers of large computers (in particular, IBM) to the providers of software for small computers (primarily Microsoft).

Means were then established for interconnecting these proliferating networks, giving rise to internetworking, and hence the Internet. A network comprises nodes (computers) and arcs (connections between them). A network is fragile if individual nodes are dependent on only a very few arcs or on a very few other nodes. The most robust networks involve a large amount of redundancy, that is to say that they comprise many computers performing similar functions, connected by many different paths.

The Internet features multiple connections among many nodes, and is therefore resilient when (not if) individual elements fail. It also scales readily, that is to say that it is capable of expanding rapidly without the serious growing pains that other topologies would suffer. The Internet emerged from research-related activities funded by the U.S. (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency - (D)ARPA - during the period c.1969-1990. During the Cold War era, military strategists were concerned about the devastating impact of neutron bomb explosions on electronic componentry. As a result, robustness and resilience (or, to use terms of that period, 'survivability' and 'fail-soft') were uppermost in the designers' minds. For historical information about the Internet, see the resources at ISOC, notably Zakon 2001, Leiner et al. 2000, and Brand 2001.

The Internet is fundamentally an infrastructure (roughly equivalent to the electricity grid, water reticulation pipework, and the networks of track, macadam and refuelling facilities that support rail and road transport). The purpose of the information infrastructure is to carry messages. A simplified explanation of the process whereby messages are transmitted is provided in Clarke 1998a.

Further levels of facilities use those messages in order to deliver services. Some services are by computers for other computers, some are by computers but for people, and some are by people and for people. Key services that are available over the underlying infrastructure include e-mail and the World Wide Web (which together dominate Internet traffic volumes), file transfer and news (also referred to as 'netnews' and 'Usenet news'). There are, however, several score other services, some of which have great significance to particular kinds of users, or as enablers of better-known services.

Until the early 1990s, the 'usage policies' that defined who could be connected to the Internet, and what applications they could use it for, precluded general use of the Internet by the public, or for commercial purposes. Around that time, telecommunications companies took over from the U.S. government the provision of the 'backbone' arcs that carry long-distance traffic, and the usage policies were changed. People perceived new opportunities to communicate with one another, and business enterprises perceived new opportunities for sales and profits. Many more access-points were added, bandwidth was increased, and new services emerged. The explosion is generally attributed to the release in early 1994 of the Mosaic web-browser, the forerunner of Netscape (Wolfe 1994b).

The growth has continued to be exponential. That has been due to a combination of more people joining in, and those who are connected using it more. The use of the Internet, like telephones, fax machines and mobile phones, is subject to what economists refer to as 'the network effect': as the number of users goes up, the value to each user increases very rapidly because there are more users with whom interactions can be conducted (Shapiro & Varian 1999). Some elements of the growth are starting to flatten out (e.g. more than half of the U.S. households that are likely to ever connect are already connected), and all growth rates within finite populations have to eventually decline; but new services in such areas as the transmission of sound, image and video are likely to result in the demand for bandwidth continuing to rise for quite some time yet.

The concept of 'architecture' encompasses the elements that make up an infrastructure, the relationships between them, and the manner in which they are created and maintained. From an engineering perspective, the Internet comprises the following:

• computers, some of which perform various message-passing functions (including routers and gateways), and some of which provide and use services of various kinds;
• communications links;
• a suite of protocols which define the rules of engagement between nodes;
• software that is hosted by the computers and that implements the protocols, comprising:
  • client software, that uses the protocols to issue requests; and
  • server software, that uses the protocols to respond to requests;
• processes to create and amend protocols; and
• governance mechanisms, including constituencies and means whereby constituents can participate and/or be represented. Key organisations include the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Descriptions of Internet architecture and of the process by which the Internet is defined and governed are available on the IAB, IETF and ICANN sites, and in Krol & Hoffman 1993 and Clarke, Dempsey et al. 1998a.

Particular aspects of the Internet's architecture have been particularly important in enabling it to deliver value to its users. These include the following:

• distribution of functions. Many different functions have to be performed in order that messages can be delivered and services provided. These functions are not inherently centralised, but rather are able to be distributed across a large number of participating nodes;
• egalitarianism. Some computers perform special functions of a technical nature; but most functions are able to be performed by many different nodes in the network. Robustness is achieved through decentralisation of responsibilities;
• distributed directories. In particular, the various directories that need to exist in order to determine possible paths a message should take, are not stored in a single location, but distributed across a large number of nodes;
• multiple connection paths. Many nodes are not connected to just a single other node, but to multiple other nodes. This results in a large number of possible paths that a message can use in order to reach its intended target, making the Internet resilient when outages occur in nodes and arcs;
• collaborative control over the few centralised functions. The functions that do need to have some degree of centralisation have been subject to collaborative processes among peers, rather than authoritarian control by one or more governments or corporations; and
• collaborative design and standards-setting. The technical specifications that determine how the Internet is constructed and operates have also been determined by collaboration within open fora, and not by fiat of any governments or corporations.
  
  

The Internet, critical though it was, was only one of a number of technological developments during the latter decades of the twentieth century that tended to increase the availability of information. These developments are usefully referred to by the generic term 'the digital revolution', and include the following additional elements (Clarke 1999g):

• the origination of digital objects. New data objects can be conveniently and inexpensively created in digital form (e.g. using desktop publishing packages, PC-based graphic design tools, animation techniques, and digital music generators);
• digitisation. This enables the conversion of existing materials into digital data objects (e.g. using scanners, optical character recognition - OCR, digital cameras, and digital audio recording);
• digital replication. This involves the near-costless copying of data objects (e.g. using disk-to-disk copying, screen scrapers, and CD-burners so inexpensive that they sell as consumer appliances);
• digital transmission. Networks enable the very rapid transmission of data objects, at marginal costs that can be so low as to be not worth measuring (e.g. using modem-to-modem transmission, CD-ROMs in the mail, and Internet services such as e-mailed attachments, FTP-download, and web-download);
• access tools. Inexpensive and widespread access to data objects is available, from a variety of devices (e.g. PCs, personal digital assistants - PDAs, mobile phones / cellphones, public kiosks, and web-enabled TV) in a vast variety of locations (including the workplace, the home, Internet cafes, games arcades and shopping malls);
• digital manipulation. Data objects can be readily massaged (e.g. using word processors, and sound and image editing tools); and
• computer-based data analysis. Data can be readily processed for such purposes as the compilation of statistics and the detection of interesting cases (e.g. data-matching, profiling, data-mining and pattern-recognition software).

Underpinning these tools are common standards and protocols, some of which are proprietary and closed, but many of which are published.

The Internet and digital technologies are just infrastructure and tools. In order to understand their impacts and implications, it is necessary to appreciate what people have done with them. The Internet has created new kinds of place or space, within which human actors are disporting themselves.

A variety of metaphors have been used in attempts to explain the Internet. My brief summary of important examples is in Clarke 1994d. (See also Stefik 1996.) Some of these metaphors focussed on the physical infrastructure; but the more interesting and useful images were concerned with its use, and the state of mind people adopted while they were using it.

One of the first people to document social behaviour in the new contexts was Rheingold 1993. In The Virtual Community, he described the patterns that arose in several pre-Internet information infrastructures (bulletin board systems - BBS, The Well and newsgroups), and in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Multi-User Dungeons and Dragons gaming (MUDs). Netizens around the turn of the century were more familiar with e-mail, e-lists (sometimes called listservs or listprocs), web-chat and ICQ. (See also Valauskas 1996.)

What these various experiences of using the Internet have in common is that the participants indulge in a 'shared hallucination' that there is a virtual place or space within which they are interacting. The term most commonly used for this is 'cyberspace'. Its use is testament to the precognition of the artist: William Gibson, the sci-fi author who coined the term in 1983, was not a user of the (then very primitive) Internet, and indeed only during the 1990s did he even start using a PC. Gibson popularised the word in his important 1984 novel Neuromancer, and the fictional virtual world that he created has since been depicted in even more compelling form in films such as The Matrix.

The neologism 'cyberspace' denies the concept of a physical 'place', by using the more abstract idea of 'space'. It couples 'space' with the mysterious and threatening prefix 'cyber-'. This is also a modern coinage, by Norbert Wiener in 1949, who created it in order to refer to layers of control mechanisms. These were thought to hold the prospect of inventing intelligence from cascades of electronic devices functionally equivalent to the governor in Watts' steam engine.

Gibson's virtual world was full of foreboding; but despite the dark overtones (or in ignorance of them), people cheerfully play in cyberspace. Its uses put varying emphases on content and connectivity. A general perception has been that content (typified by use of the web) would overtake connectivity (typified by e-mail); but some feel that a balance between the two will always be evident (Odlyzko 2001).

Associated with cyberspace behaviour is an ethos. The ethos evident during the 1990s derived from the values of pioneers, and it is unclear the extent to which the surge of newcomers will absorb the old ethos or drown it. Nonetheless, there are some expectations that still appear to be commonly held among participants. They are:

• interpersonal communications. Many participants perceive cyberspace primarily as a context to support interactions among people. Organisations are regarded as enablers, providers of resources, and offerers of services, rather than as participants;
• internationalism. Although the invention and initial implementation of the Internet were a primarily U.S. activity, participants mostly perceive it as a universal service. As the aphorism has it, 'there are no boundaries in cyberspace' (or at least there are none inherent in the architecture), and connectivity and content are technically open to anyone, irrespective of location or nationality;
• egalitarianism. Participants who are fulfilling particular roles in some services have more power than others. For example, in the case of moderators of e-lists and forums, this extends as far as blocking messages; and in the case of MUDs, a user who controls the space (a 'god' or 'wizard') can even exclude a particular identity or IP address from participation. In most of the contexts created by Internet services, however, users do not experience a hierarchy of authority, and people behave as though they are, by and large, equal;
• openness. Information about the Internet's fundamental protocols and standards is readily accessible to those who seek it out (although that may not be the case with particular services, or with proprietary extensions to services);
• participation. The Internet, and many of the services available over it, embody no inherent barriers against active participation by any party. Moreover, many services arise from collaborative activity among many individuals;
• community. These factors result in a feeling, common among many participants, that they are part of one or more e-communities; and
• gratis services. The costs involved in establishing and running the Internet are hidden from the view of most users, and many perceive it to be gratis. In fact consumers do pay, in particular through telephone bills, equipment purchases and software licensing fees; and a great many people and organisations absorb costs because it suits their personal psyche or organisational business model to do so.

In every case, the popular perceptions of cyberspace as being free and open are partly misguided; but they are part of the shared hallucination.

An expectation of greater freedoms has been one of the recurring elements within electronic communities. This was reflected in the term 'electronic frontier', which invoked the image of the 'wild west' of the U.S. in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, where pioneers were relatively unfettered by law enforcement agencies. The term was used in the title of a significant association formed to defend netizens' rights, namely the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) (Kapor & Barlow 1990). It has also been co-opted by other organisations, such as Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA).

The kinds of freedoms that net users expect are documented in Clarke 1997e. One aspect of particular significance is the prospect of greatly enhanced freedom of access to information, summed up by the call-to-arms 'information wants to be free' (Clarke 1999f). Particularly since 1995, the efforts of millions of people have resulted in an unprecedented volume of information being made available, readily discovered and easily and quickly downloaded to individuals' own machines, for display, analysis, printing, republishing and adaptation.

The nature of the liberating influences needs to be considered at several levels. At the level of individual behaviour, the following were evident:

• freedom of information access, both on request and in the context of formal teaching and learning (e.g. Perrone 1996);
• freedom of information expression, through the ease with which any person could e-publish;
• assured archival of information, and reliable rediscovery of it. This was a result of spiders seeking out content, indexing it, and making that index available for searching; and the storage of information in multiple locations, through mirroring. The effect was an emergent, collaborative virtual e-library; and
• perhaps, the interconnection of personal appliances, and household appliances (Odlyzko 1999).

At the level of social behaviour, the following were in prospect:

• greatly enhanced communities, because they could now be based on affinity or common interest alone, whether or not the members were in close proximity to one another;
• new forms of collaborative origination of intellectual property works, and of interaction among works (e.g. Sewell 1997, Hibbitts 1997);
• breakdown of the tyranny of distance. Distance and timezone isolation disadvantage the inhabitants of nations that are far from the majority of the world's population. The net effectively brought distant countries closer to the rest of the world (see, for example, Titelbaum 1997). This is globalism of a kind, although not the economically-motivated form pursued by the G8 and the transnational corporations whose interests the G8 serves; and
• support for diasporas to discover one another and virtually unite, resulting in greatly enhanced prospects for the survival of threatened cultures and languages.

At the level of economic behaviour, the following were evident or in prospect:

• convenient e-payment mechanisms, including both identified and anonymous forms (e.g. Levy 1994);
• consumer power, through more direct action against suppliers whose behaviour was seen to be unreasonable (e.g. Andresen 1999);
• consumer power, through aggregation of demand (Hagel & Rayport 1996, Hagel & Armstrong 1997, Hagel & Singer 1999); and
• either a new economics (e.g. Kelly 1997, Goldhaber 1997, Ghosh 1998), or at least a change in emphasis towards particular kinds of economics (Shapiro & Varian 1999). The new economics might be more or less advantageous for large-scale corporations. This is because existing middlemen are under threat of 'disintermediation' through direct selling by manufacturers to the ultimate consumer; but, on the other hand, cyberspace creates opportunities for 're-intermediation'.

At the level of political behaviour, the following were in prospect:

• greatly enhanced freedom of thought, as a result of the increased information flows;
• significantly reduced scope for governments to manage information flows;
• as a result of the reduced capacity for governments to manipulate the populace, increased freedom of action for people;
• voter power and enhanced capability to participate in political activity, through e-democracy of one form or another (e.g. Ronfeldt 1992, Schwartz 1994, Morrisett 1996, Evans 2000); and
• an outlet for citizens in un-free countries, whereby the iniquities of the regime could be published to the world, and political opposition could be organised (e.g. Pantic 1997, Bennahum 1997, Krebs 2001).

The person who probably encapsulated the promise of the Internet most effectively, and certainly most famously, was John Perry Barlow (1994, 1996a - 'We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace', and 1996b). Politicians who hailed the prospects that the Internet offered included the European Commission (Bangemann 1994), and U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, who made much of the 'information superhighway' metaphor. For an analysis of Gore's actual contributions, see Wiggins 2000; see also Clarke 1994d.

Doubters of course existed (e.g. Lappin 1995, Stoll 1995, Floridi 1996, Greenleaf 1998). But the promises were not mere rhetoric. Although the excited claims required some qualification, considerable progress was evident in every one of the instances identified in this section.

This part of the paper shifts the focus from the hopefulness of the recent past to the far less encouraging patterns of the present. It catalogues the many factors that are at work to prevent the liberating potentials of the Internet bearing fruit.

Even among enthusiasts, misgivings have been apparent about whether the promise of the Internet can be fulfilled. These include questions about the extent to which it is feasible to achieve the articulation of the alternative economic patterns, so as to supplement or even supplant the incumbent conventional capitalist processes (e.g. Stalder 1999). In the aftermath of the collapse of the dot.com bubble around 2000, the debate about whether there are such things as 'new business models' rages on. Further expressions of concern about misfit between social need and technological reality are to be found in Brown & Duguid 2000 and Borgman 2000.

In 1994 I expressed concerns about 'the limited focus of debate' (Clarke 1994c). I drew attention to the way in which discussions about information infrastructure were using a vocabulary that reflected historical relationships between people and social institutions, rather than the relationships that were more appropriate to the present and the future. Key elements of that vocabulary included:

• 'provide' and 'provider', and 'deliver' and 'delivery' (both of which were implicitly performed by corporations and government agencies, not by individuals);
• 'inform' (implicitly by authorities to targets, not by anyone to anyone);
• 'customer', 'consumer' and 'user' (implicitly as targets of larger entities); and
• 'choice' (implicitly among a limited range of preset alternatives).

I stressed at the time the vital need for a participative approach rather than a master-servant framework, and proposed the following principles for the design of information infrastructure:

• openness, in the sense of free choice by participants of providers of content, services, delivery and platform;
• 'relative bandwidth symmetry', to ensure that there was no inherent bias in the infrastructure that precluded individuals from performing provider roles; and
• plurality and dynamism in the design process, and the avoidance of a narrow engineering approach to devising the architecture, because there were so many different services involved, so many participants, and so many different perspectives, some of which inevitably conflicted.

Seven years later, there is little evidence of these principles being applied, and every sign that corporations and government agencies perceive the Internet as just a broadcast medium with a low-bandwidth back-channel, and themselves as projectors of messages to a largely inert and manipulable public.

A further disappointment has been the volatility of website contents and domain names, and the very patchy extent to which electronic archives have actually arisen. The websites of disestablished agencies such as the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) tend to simply disappear, with mirroring of the agency's publications performed by anyone who has downloaded them in anticipation of their disappearance (and who is prepared to breach copyright by placing them on a website). In Australia, government documents are routinely removed when a change in government occurs, through what appear to be active measures by the incoming government to deny access to historical documents. This creates serious difficulties for policy research.

Another concern has been the so-called 'digital divide', which refers to the dependence of Internet access on local infrastructure, personal capabilities and motivation, and the consequential inequitable scope for people in remote and economically deprived regions to participate. The term relates to the 'north-south' divide between rich and poor nations, although some commentators have co-opted it to refer to economic and social inequalities within individual countries, primarily the U.S.A. (e.g. Kahin & Keller 1995).

Change of any kind disturbs established patterns, and a fundamental shift like the explosion of the Internet in the mid-to-late 1990s inevitably had substantial impacts that harmed some people's interests, and caused many people concern.

Although some people have taken advantage of the Internet to perform their work in or close to their homes, others miss the social aspects of conventional workplaces. Another concern has been the emergence of subcontracted tele-working, with corporations taking advantage of telecommunications to reduce not only their infrastructure costs but also their salary costs, and hence the income levels of some categories of employees (such as call-centre staff).

Another area of concern for some people has been the undermining of intellectual property. Some goods and services have become easily replicable as a result of digital technologies. Consequently, individuals who originate and sell such works might see their income stream reduced. This applies to artists of various kinds who both originate and sell to the works' ultimate consumers. It also applies to those whose works are processed through intermediaries, although in that case the originator generally gains only a small proportion of the total revenue. There are counter-arguments, however, to the effect that intellectual property is untenable in the digital era, that the long production lines for publishing are no longer needed, and that new business models will rapidly emerge whereby originators will still be rewarded. This critical issue is further considered in sections 3.4 and 3.6 below.

Predecessors to the Internet such as the Usenet news network had already involved many instances of misbehaviour (e.g. Rosenberg 1993), and emergent applications of the law to human behaviour on the net (e.g. Auburn 1995). As early as April 1995, I compiled a substantial list of what I referred to as 'dysfunctional human behaviour on the Internet' (Clarke 1995a). This included accidental dysfunctionality (information overload, rumour and accidental misinformation, negligent defamation, persistence, minor plagiarism, inadequate care with data, and unauthorised spidering), socially aggressive dysfunctionality (intentional misinformation, flaming, intentional defamation, harassment, mail-bombing, obscenity, incitement, impersonation and surveillance), economically aggressive dysfunctionality (spamming, advertising, promotion and soliciting, secondary use of data, serious plagiarism, abuse of intellectual property rights, breaking into systems, viruses and worms, and security breach) and avoidance dysfunctionality (circumvention, anonymisation and obscuration).

Harassment, for example, extends beyond the conventional problems of aggressive language and persistent unwelcome communications, through electronic stalking, to an account of 'a rape in cyberspace' (Dibbell 1993).

Freedom of speech has a counterpoint in freedom to indulge in salacious gossip about individuals, rumour-mongering, or indeed merely publishing a true statement, all of which can constitute defamation in one jurisdiction or another. An early, contentious example was the book published by Mitterand's doctor very shortly after the sometime French President's death in 1995. More recent examples have been fought out between parties in the commercial realm, in particular Macquarie Bank v. Berg, and Gutnick v. Dow Jones.

An e-mail message broadcast to a long list of addressees is very similar to other forms of publication, because it involves 'pushing' information by one person to one or more other people. The challenge currently before the courts is to construct a sensible application of existing laws to the quite different pull-technology of the web. For a court to rule that placement of a document on a website constitutes publication in every jurisdiction in which it is subsequently downloaded would subject every website owner to the vagaries of in excess of 300 jurisdictions; and if that were the case, then the chilling effect on free speech would be dramatic. In Macquarie Bank v. Berg, the judge refused to grant an interim injunction for that reason (Parry 1999). See also Godwin 1996 and Martin 2000.

There has also been disappointment about people's limited exploitation of the net's capacity for openness and diversity. The consumer mentality is strong, and many people content themselves with visits and revisits to commercial websites such as Disney and sites linked with popular TV programmes. Habit is strong too, and many people appear to limit themselves to specific e-communities rather than sampling the available richness. Commercial offerings are exacerbating this by offering filtering and personalisation features that narrow users' experiences to preselected categories. Rather than encouraging expanded worldviews, the Internet has even been accused by some of fostering social division and extremism.

Another downside that emerged early in the life of the Internet was attacks on Internet services. Many of these were and are performed because they demonstrate the attackers' skills and daring; and as a result the term 'exploits' is commonly used to refer to such attacks, and the term 'malware' usefully describes software that performs, or enables individuals to perform, such exploits.

A common form of malware is viruses (faqs.org 2001). A virus is a program that attaches copies of itself to other programs. It may perform no other function than its own replication. It may, however, 'carry a payload', i.e. perform some additional function. This may have nuisance value (e.g. displaying a funny face on the screen of the infected computer), or serious consequences (such as the deletion of the directory that records the location of files stored on the infected machine). In order to avoid early detection, viruses are commonly designed to delay the performance of functions other than replication.

Viruses had long been transmitted via diskette. They had also taken advantage of pre-Internet data communications, such as programs stored on bulletin boards. A virus that propagates via telecommunication means is commonly referred to as a 'worm' (after Brunner 1975). The Internet provided a greatly enhanced capability for worms to infect large numbers of machines in a short period of time. The first celebrated instance of a successful worm was that released by Robert Morris in 1988 (Reynolds 1989). Because of the naiveté of users, inadequate care by some information systems professionals, and the culpably insecure state of software distributed by some vendors, worms continue to flourish, with multiple major security alerts occurring each year.

Beyond viruses and worms are other forms of attack. These include:

• 'break-ins' to computer services and to computer storage such as databases of credit card details (usually referred to as 'hacking', but more sensibly described as 'cracking');
• actions taken once computer services have been broken into, such as the defacing of webpages (most commonly their replacement with an alternative page), and the extraction of copies of files; and
• 'denial of service' attacks. These commonly involve the bombardment of a server with so much traffic that it is unable to cope with the volume and becomes unusable. The source of a simple attack is readily traced, and hence sophisticated attackers take advantage of weaknesses in other people's servers to cause the traffic to be generated by multiple servers. This is referred to as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Servers have proven to be highly susceptible to even quite simple attacks. This is because a great deal of software is distributed in an intrinsically insecure state, especially that of the supplier dominant in several segments of the market, Microsoft. In general, software is not deemed to be a product for the purposes of product liability law. The result is that actions against suppliers of software products have to be by means of torts such as negligence, which have much higher threshholds of tolerance of supplier and product deficiency than do product liability laws; or through 'deceptive conduct' provisions, which seldom provide aggrieved parties with satisfaction. In short, suppliers are subject to seriously inadequate disincentives against distributing inherently insecure software.

Another concern felt by many people has been the undermining of existing censorship controls. The term 'censorship' is used here in its generic sense, to refer to the prevention of public access to information of any kind, for any reason. Examples of such content that has arguably become more readily available as a result of the Internet include the teaching of bomb-making, and possibly of means of conducting insurrection; the incitement of violence, particularly racially-related violence, including the sale of Nazi memorabilia (see, for example, BBC 2000); and access to pornography that breaches censorship laws within a particular jurisdiction.

Although there is a firm basis for such concerns, discussions are often heated, and judgement impaired. The extent of abuse is frequently exaggerated, and non-infringing content and actions are often caught up in the process. For example, little evidence appears to have been advanced that the availability of instruction in violence has greatly increased since the advent of the Internet; and a study of recruitment by extremist groups on the Internet found little to suggest that a serious new problem had arisen (Ray & Marsh 2001). On the other hand, restrictions on the availability of sex-related materials to minors, by means of 'behind-the counter' storage and 'adults-only' shops, are not as readily achieved on the Internet.

Moreover, what many people refer to as pornography may infringe their good taste, but is in many jurisdictions not actually illegal. In addition, a great deal of misinformation has been peddled in relation to pornographic materials thrusting themselves in front of children. The 'porn in kiddies' bedrooms' furore arose from a very poorly conducted, and arguably fraudulent, undergraduate assignment publicised on the cover of Time magazine as though it were fact (Elmer-DeWitt 1995). For negative reviews of the article, see Hotwired 1995.

The Internet is not an unmitigated 'good thing', and its downsides need to be recognised and addressed. Many of the arguments offered by sceptics have, however, been found to be exaggerated, and some have even been unfounded.

The Internet's incidental social impacts motivated some calls for regulation, and some extensions to law have resulted. On the other hand, vested interests quickly discovered that the changes had negative impacts for them which they regarded as very serious. This section considers effects on governments, and the next those on large corporations.

One concern has been the undermining of the rationale underlying existing laws. The particular case of copyright law is considered in the following section. In the area of online gambling, many governments' activities have been decidedly hypocritical. They are subject to the fiscal imperative of sustaining taxation revenues from existing licensed gambling venues, and the need to appease powerful commercial lobby groups. They have accordingly been forced into the prohibition of Internet gambling, even though some of them had the opportunity to address the social ills by attracting online casinos into their jurisdictions while imposing consumer safeguards (Schwartz 1995, Clarke, Dempsey et al. 1998c).

A further concern is the unenforceability of existing laws. One reason for this is the difficulties confronting investigation of criminal acts, and the gathering of information with evidentiary value (Clarke, Dempsey, et al. 1998b). Examples of activities that have created challenges are the use of various Internet channels to promote fraudulent schemes, and for what amount to unlicensed investment newsletters and stock price manipulation.

Criminal activities are difficult to pursue when they are extra-jurisdictional (taking place outside the reach of the jurisdiction in question) or transjurisdictional (that is to say that parts of a transaction take place in two or more separate jurisdictions). It is especially inconvenient where one of the other jurisdictions has laws that make the acquisition of investigative or evidentiary information difficult. In the case of the Internet, the geographical location of an event may be very difficult to determine, and hence some actions may be effectively supra-jurisdictional such that no court can reasonably claim to be able to consider the case.

One effect of the Internet has been to lower the cost of locating transactions in convenient jurisdictions such as 'tax havens' - which are thus no longer accessible only to corporations and wealthy individuals - and hence of so-called 'regulatory arbitrage'. See Froomkin 1997, Kahin & Nesson 1997 and Clarke 1997a.

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that cyberspace will remain a lawless electronic frontier for very long. Lessig 1999 argued that there were two kinds of what he called 'code': 'East Coast Code' or statute law; and 'West Coast Code' or 'instructions embedded in the software and hardware that make cyberspace work' (p.54). His argument was seriously deficient, because in defining 'code' as only the software and hardware, he overlooked many aspects of the architecture of the Internet that were outlined in section 2.3 above. Although Lessig did later use the term 'architecture' (pp.87, 100-108, 220-221, 236-237), his usage remained too imprecise. What he did achieve, however, was to highlight the fact that the Internet's architecture embodies some capacities for control, and that it can be adapted to embody more. This will be further discussed in a later section.

Another consideration is that communities within cyberspace exhibit a variety of self-regulatory mechanisms, and these also represent a kind of law. The possibility exists that a new internationalist jurisdiction may emerge, specifically to deal with behaviour in electronic contexts. This would be a serious challenge to governments, not only because it would compromise their sovereignty, but also because of the difficulties of definition of the boundary between geographical and virtual jurisdictions.

Beyond the question of the rule of law, the Internet is perceived by some people as a threat to national sovereignty and cultural integrity. This argument goes along the lines that the Internet is heavily dominated by the U.S.A., variously in terms of the technology, the services and the content; and Internet traffic continues to be heavily dominated by the English language. The Internet therefore imposes foreign values, effecting yet more intrusions into the lingual and cultural integrity of countries and societies whose first language is other than English. It is thus a weapon of cultural imperialism.

Finally, the freedoms that the Internet has given rise to include some that, at least from the perspective of governments, are of an undesirable nature. Signal among these 'undesirable freedoms' are the following:

• freedom of access to governmental and parliamentary information. This exposes dubious practices to public view. Although considerable progress has been made in some countries, access continues to be patchy, even within the U.S. Congress (Corn 2000);
• the freedom to contest official history. Governments inevitably indulge in historical revisionism, or portray aspects of history in a new light, or 'put their own spin on' past events. The Internet tends to make the credibility of a government's depictions subject to greater challenge than before. Two examples with contrary implications are attempts to maintain the Japanese version of the emancipation of Korea and northern China in the 1930s, and the preclusion of denial of the Holocaust. This challenge arises from a combination of:
  • the freedom of originators and adaptors of content to publish their materials widely; and
  • the inbuilt resistance to attempts to suppress content, because of the ease with which copies are reticulated, stored in multiple locations (or 'mirrored'), and discovered;
• the freedom to communicate privately. National security and law enforcement agencies are used to being able to intercept and understand messages and conversations. They have successfully constrained freedoms of the entire population through 'mail covers' and 'wire-tapping', because a (small) proportion of messages and conversations, if captured, provide intelligence about or evidence of serious criminal behaviour. Various aspects of the Internet challenge that cherished power;
• the freedom to utter statements that are anti-government or seditious. This has been the target of action not only by governments of un-free countries such as China, but also by authoritarian governments in developing countries such as Malaysia, and advanced economies such as Singapore (e.g. Barme & Sang 1997, Tao 2001); and
• e-democracy. This creates a real risk of an increase in participative democracy at the cost of power relationships embedded within contemporary representative democracy.
  
  

Corporations, meanwhile, have perceived a rather different collection of ills arising from the Internet.

One has been challenges to corporate brand names and images, approximately equivalent to the defamation of corporations. Organisations that have been subjected to close attention by consumer and public interest advocates in a movement usefully referred to as 'corporation-watch' include McDonald's, Nike, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, and Nestlé.

Corporations tend to regard the community aspects of the Internet as a resource to be plundered once it becomes apparent how. One aspect of the e-community ethos concerns them, however, because they perceive it as socialism reinvented in a dangerous form. This is the so-called 'open source' phenomenon. The open source movement argues that software should be licensed without cost, but subject to conditions that ensure that bugs are reported, fixes publicised, and enhancements made available subject to similar conditions (Stallman 1992, Raymond 1998, Moglen 1999, Bezroukov 1999). Open source is a concern for large corporations in two ways:

• it involves considerable activity that represents a threat to sales by corporations; and
• it is supported by economic arguments that justify a great deal of economic activity being effectively performed without the profit motive playing a significant role. This is seen by champions of the corporate sphere as an affront, because it represents a denial of the legitimacy of capitalism.

Whereas the 'cooperative' movement is an object of derision among corporate executives, open source is threatening to them. Despite those concerns, many small companies appear to be effectively creating and using open source software, and a few large corporations are investigating it, including IBM in the context of the operating system Linux.

An important Internet battle cry is the aforementioned 'information wants to be free' (Clarke 1999f). The open movement has been applied to information as well as source code, and has thus given rise to arguments for open content, in such areas as technical protocols and standards but also education and the law. See, for example, the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII), which makes freely available the corpus of primary and secondary law of Australia and New Zealand, and whose underlying philosophy and software are being applied in countries as diverse as Ireland and Mongolia.

Another problem for some corporations is the difficulties for the broadcast mode of communication that are presented by the Internet in its current manifestation. Broadcasting comprises one-way dissemination of undifferentiated content, with no or a very limited back-channel to the broadcaster. Radio and television represented great progress about a century and a half-century ago respectively. The potentials of contemporary telecommunications technologies, and the expectations of a now much-better-educated public, go far beyond them. But leaving the broadcast era behind is contrary to the mindset of the one-at-many direct marketers whose emergence broadcast media stimulated.

The most nervous reaction among corporations, however, has been that of publishers, who have come to perceive a massive threat to the intellectual property, especially copyright, which they have garnered over the years, and which is the basis of many micro-monopolies, and hence super-profits. The impact of the digital era on the income streams of artists was noted earlier. The publishing of magazines, books, music and films has long been industrialised. The copying and distribution of digital media by parties other than the copyright owners places under threat the revenue, profits, employment levels and even survival of corporations in those value chains.

Disputes of this nature have accompanied a succession of technologies, long before the advent of the Internet. In recent times, for example, the explosion of videocassette recorders (VCRs) resulted in attempts by copyright owners to have laws enforced that were clearly no longer workable. Once the smoke had cleared, and the industry's arguments were carefully assessed, the practicability and reasonableness of their proposals were found wanting. Instead, copyright laws were amended to actually permit people to lawfully do what they were already doing (recording broadcast copyright works, for the purposes of personal use, within-home entertainment, and 'time-shifting').

Nonetheless, large corporations dependent on copyright have pursued the line that the use of the various capabilities that have become available during the digital era represents theft. Because of the qualities of books, the book publishing industry has not been significantly affected during the first decade. However, the shrink-wrapped software industry, dominated by Microsoft and spearheaded by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), has long regarded itself as being threatened by the digital era. The film industry has also been very active, particularly in attacking people and companies that have cracked the codes designed to protect digital video/versatile discs (DVDs) from being copied.

A further development has been the emergence of so-called 'peer-to-peer' (P2P) file-sharing tools (Clarke 2000d). Most of the attention to date has been attracted by Napster (e.g. Mann 2000). This was a centralised catalogue. The files that were the subject of the catalogue were not, however, stored centrally, but rather on very large numbers of servers throughout the world. They were primarily music in the MP3 format, and many of the files allegedly involved breach of copyright. At its peak during the second half of 2000, the volume of activity on Napster showed arguably the fastest growth of any metric on the Internet up to that time.

Unsurprisingly, the music recording industry, which is dominated by a few very large corporations and represented in particular by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), perceived its interests to be seriously threatened by Napster. Because there was a central catalogue, a 'choke-point' existed, and action by the RIAA between 1999 and 2001 to gain an injunction against the operator of the catalogue could, and eventually did, result in the collapse of the unregulated, copyright-breaching service (Clarke 2000d).

Such a strategy is unlikely to work against a P2P scheme that features a distributed catalogue. By the time of Napster's demise, there were already more than a dozen contenders, the best-known of which was Gnutella (so-called because it spreads easily ...). In early 2001, despite the much greater difficulties involved, the RIAA had already commenced its pursuit of these services as well, in the hope of somehow sustaining its control over the market for copyrighted music. The second prong of its attack, coded the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), is a desperate search for some form of cryptographic or steganographic mechanism that could prevent unauthorised use and copying of files.

The significance of P2P extends far beyond music. Every category of object that can be expressed in digital form is capable of being reticulated and mirrored using a combination of distributed database and distributed directory approaches. Revenue-generating images and video are forthcoming battlefields. From the social and political perspectives, however, the most critical aspects are not entertainment, but information; and high-volume, time-critical delivery modes such as films are less relevant than simple text formats.

The Internet was only one of a number of relevant technological developments during the latter part of the twentieth century. A considerable collection of technologies has emerged whose purpose is to monitor individuals and populations in a cost-effective manner. 'Dataveillance', or the surveillance of people through data trails that they leave behind them, was examined in Clarke 1988.

The underlying requirement is individual data trails arising from particular kinds of transactions, which can be consolidated and subjected to analysis. Examples of data trails include ATM withdrawals, credit card transactions, and records generated by telephone calls, building access and the use of toll roads (Clarke 1996a).

Further technologies that have emerged during the closing decades of the century include the following:

• ubiquitous computing. This involves the integration of mobile telephones, portable computers, and personal digital assistants; and 'computer-wear' such as watches, rings, brooches and spectacles;
• video-surveillance, incorporating pattern-matching to recognise such things as the codes on vehicle number plates (e.g. Dixon 1995, PI 1999);
• digital rights management technologies. These comprise active measures that invade the private space of users of electronic resources (Greenleaf 1998, Greenleaf 1999, Clarke & Nees 2000, Gilmore 2001);
• identification technologies (Clarke 1994e) and identity authentication technologies (Clarke 1999d), including chips embedded in carriers such as smartcards (Clarke 1997f), digital signatures (Greenleaf & Clarke 1997, Clarke 2001g), and biometrics (Clarke 2001f); and
• the incorporation of identification and locator technologies, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), into personal mobile appliances, such as mobile telephones, in order to produce location and tracking infrastructure for ubiquitous mass surveillance (Clarke 1999h).

The surveillance society has arrived, without people really noticing (Clarke 2001b).

Suppliers of goods and services have concocted imperatives that demand the development and application of these invasive technologies. In addition to technological determinism ('I can therefore I must'), drivers for these privacy-hostile and freedom-hostile applications have also included marketing determinism ('I can imagine they need it, so I must make them need it'), fiscal determinism ('everything must cost less tomorrow than it did today'), and what might be termed 'original sin' determinism ('people can't be trusted', or, as law enforcement agencies are reputed to express it, '10% of the population is inveterately honest, 10% is inveterately dishonest, and with the other 80% it depends').

During the second half of the twentieth century, the public sector has been both monolithic and multipartite: individual agencies have exercised independence from others when it suits their ends, but clubbed together in other circumstances. The private sector has been similar, with competition complemented by collaboration within conglomerates, joint ventures, strategic partnerships, and industry associations. The public sector has, among its other roles, been expected to regulate the behaviour of corporations; but has also, of course, used it as a supplier of goods and services.

The power of the organisations that are able to deploy surveillance technologies has been enhanced by the recent tendencies towards information sharing among organisations across both the public and private sectors, and towards outsourcing of 'non-core functions' in order to produce a matrix that has blurred the once-distinct boundaries between the public and private sectors.

The power-sharing model for the twenty-first century appears to be based on three models. One is the U.S. aerospace-defense complex of the latter part of the twentieth century, with its close linkages between companies and public sector agencies. The second is the Japanese keiretsu, the horizontally- and vertically-linked industrial structure of postwar Japan; and the third is the Korean chaebol - conglomerates characterised by close control, authoritarian management, and centralised decisionmaking. In the emergent scheme, large corporations and government agencies get to share power; but citizens and consumers do not.

Governments, both in relatively free and relatively un-free countries, together with major corporations whose profits are dependent on copyright, have all perceived the need to take action against the excess of freedoms wrought by the Internet. The fightback has been sufficiently vigorous to be worth referring to as a counterreformation. This section considers measures undertaken, firstly by governments, and then by corporations.

During the mid-1990s, a series of moderately hysterical overreactions occurred, with law enforcement agencies exceeding their powers or applying their powers in ill-judged ways, and Internet service providers misunderstanding the law's requirements of them. An early example was the Bavarian police intervention with Compuserve (Kunze 1996, Lewis 1996). There is little doubt that adaptations of the law are necessary and appropriate; and that collaboration among the law enforcement agencies of multiple countries is essential. The question is the extent to which the freedoms of the law-abiding majority are permitted to be trampled on in the attempt to rein in those activities of a small minority that are actually criminal.

A recent study of the control of authoritarian regimes over Internet connectivity and usage concluded that there is already a range of ways in which the liberating potentials of the current Internet can be controlled by a determined government (Kalathil & Boas 2001).

Governments of relatively free countries are subject to constitutional and parliamentary constraints. To overcome the hurdles, they use law and order issues to generate public support for authoritarian measures. The opportunities range from the much-used terrorist attack threat, through the risk of theft of fissionable materials, and the increased incidence of burglaries by drug addicts, to the theft of credit card details on the Internet. (The epithet that sums this up is that 'all that is necessary to convert a liberal to a conservative is the theft of their child's bicycle').

National security and law enforcement agencies have furthered their aims by making the most of each new wave of virus transmission over the Internet, of website 'hacking', and of distributed denial of service attacks. Particularly in view of the convenient timing of many of the events, it has even been suggested that the sources of some of the attacks may be people at least tolerated by, and perhaps even directed and funded by, national security and law enforcement agencies, especially those of the United States (e.g. Madsen 2001).

One approach to tightening controls is to impose adaptations to Internet infrastructure. A key example has been proxy servers for the purpose of filtering prohibited materials such as political speech treated by the regime as seditious (e.g. in Singapore and China) and illegal pornography (e.g. in the U.S.A. and Australia). These impositions are highly unpopular with many users and service providers, not only because they deny freedom of access and choice, but also because they impose overheads, they are only partially effective, and they involve considerable collateral damage (such as the exclusion of breast cancer information in the process of blocking sources of pictures of naked women intended to provide sexual excitement).

The creation of 'computer crimes' predates the explosion of the Internet. The pursuit of hackers has been conducted with energy, if not always with precision and commensurate force (e.g. Sterling 1992).

The increasing Internet-dependence of the economy, businesses, utilities, government, law enforcement and national security has combined with poor-quality software to result in concerns extending beyond mere susceptibility to vandalism to the robustness of the (national) information infrastructure. (See, for example, Schwartau 1996, and Clinton Administration 1997.) Security threats are now being routinely used by national security and law enforcement agencies as justification for increased surveillance capabilities over Internet traffic and content. Although spearheaded by the United States, this movement extends to many other governments by means of bilateral relationships and multilateral clubs of such agencies.

The fightback has seen intemperate expansions of the powers of national security and law enforcement agencies. These statutes have generally extended the criminal law to encompass particular kinds of actions in relation to computers and networks. In addition to providing reasonable clarifications and extensions, they have included seriously privacy-invasive and freedom-threatening measures. These have included the criminalisation of activities that are mainstream behaviour, in some cases compromising the need for the prosecution to prove criminal intent; and the removal of constraints on agencies in a manner that invites abuse. Some examples are the U.S. F.B.I. initiative code-named Carnivore (Blaze & Bellovin 2000), the U.K. Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (popularly referred to as the RIP Act), and the Australian Cybercrime Bill 2001. The measures have been passed through multi-governmental bodies (such as the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention), in order to coordinate the provision of national laws, and acquire the gloss of international imprimatur.

Beyond changes to the law, opportunities for control arise because various aspects of the Internet are not quite as distributed as is often assumed. A salutary lesson was provided by Kashpureff's demonstration of the fragility of the domain name system or DNS (Diamond 1998). Authorities in some countries have become adept at the exploitation of 'choke-points' in order to strangle the net's liberating influence (Mann 2001). The Singapore Broadcasting Authority, as the relevant agency within a small island nation with high levels of control over all aspects of the economy and society, has been readily able to force Internet traffic through proxy-servers. To date, China has also sustained tight control. The Chinese government's power is in one sense less than Singapore's because of the country's vastly greater scale. On the other hand, China's technological infrastructure is far less sophisticated, and its traditions are even less favourable to democracy than is the case with Singapore.

Another way in which the net's freedom can be attacked is through increasing governmental involvement in Internet governance, and a concomitant drift away from the original pattern of voluntary collaboration among individuals. In such countries as the U.S.A. and Australia, new governing bodies are being constituted as nonprofit organisations, with government exercising a great deal of influence, but unable to exert complete control. It is unlikely that citizens in all countries will be so fortunate. In the case of the key organisation, ICANN, the negotiation of constitution, constituencies, representational arrangements, structure, process and policies has proven to be very difficult and protracted (Bayers 2000).

The use of existing choke-points is likely to be supplemented by attempts to create new ones, and the hierarchisation of the hitherto relatively open and distributed net. A recent example has been the pressure put on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to adapt the Internet's architecture to facilitate traffic monitoring and content monitoring. To date, the IETF has been resistant to the proposition, but this may well be more for engineering reasons than because of public policy considerations.

In the private sector, one all-too-apparent strand of the counterreformation has been activities designed to advantage copyright-owning corporations. These have included:

• appropriation of public information as the private property of corporations. This has already occurred with statistical information (Wigan 1992), geophysical data, and even the law (Wolfe 1994a). Intellectual property regimes have been established in relation to plant DNA, and there is a considerable risk that information about the human genome will be propertised as well;
• claims by copyright-owning corporations, and suppliers to them, that give the impression that copyright law provides rights to the owner considerably broader than it actually does (e.g. Stefik 1997);
• increased contract-based publication, particularly through subscription services. Documents such as 'consultancy reports' are priced so highly that public and university libraries do not, and realistically cannot, acquire copies. This distribution process is generally not accompanied by any arrangements to ensure that copies become publicly available and archived, after the initial window of sales opportunity has passed;
• extensions to copyright law such as the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) 1998, and similar statutes passed by countries such as Canada and Australia following U.S. success in convincing the World International Property Organisation (WIPO). These have further protected the interests of the predominantly U.S. publishing industries (Samuelson 1996). The extensions criminalise an excessively broad range of activities. In particular:
  • the technique of reverse engineering of software (which enables a person to infer a program's design by examining its behaviour) has been banned by the U.S. and by some governments friendly to its position, despite it having long been a crucial aspect of the innovation process; and
  • the manufacture and sale of devices whose primary purpose is deemed to be to circumvent copyright protections have also been criminalised, despite the importance of such tools for a variety of other purposes (e.g. Samuelson 1999).

The implications of such manoeuvres were examined in Clarke 1999g and in Stalder 2001, and were argued to threaten freedom of information flows, and create the risk of a new 'Dark Ages'.

Meanwhile, information technology suppliers have grasped opportunities to further their own interests and those of their corporate clients. One example is the distribution by software vendors (primarily Microsoft) of versions of software whose features include auto-reporting of unregistered Microsoft software. Even greater control over user patterns is being sought as part of Microsoft's .Net initiative, by storing software centrally, rather than on customers' own machines.

An especially insidious manoeuvre has been the adaptation of Internet protocols to incorporate identifiers of various kinds. Some of these have been unique device-identifiers, which, for example, enable an organisation to check which workstation or handheld digital assistant is being used. Some kinds of devices (e.g. Ethernet network interface cards, and Sun workstations) have always carried an identifier. A much more general-purpose ID was recently proposed by Intel, in the form of a Processor Serial Number. This was dubbed Big Brother Inside by its opponents, and it appears that it is not currently documented on the company's website.

Another approach has been to use surreptitious techniques to force the device or the client software to disclose identifying information. Two common means whereby users' trust is abused are cookies and web bugs.

The most freedom-threatening initiatives of all have involved measures to produce and profit from the surveillance nirvana of a unique personal identifier. Techniques that have been attempted to date include:

• digital signatures and associated enforced identity authentication and digital certificates (Clarke 2001g);
• multiple, successive manoeuvres by Microsoft, most recently its Passport 'service'; and
• an alliance between the telecommunications industry and the IETF to create a standard called ENUM. The purpose is to establish a single unique contact number for individuals, which represents not merely a unique personal identifier, but a unique locating and tracking tool at the same time (Faltstrom 2000, Rutkowski 2001).

There is also the probability that the market-determined directions that the Internet takes will work against its hitherto liberating influences. Concerns include:

• the balkanisation of the Internet, as organisations carve off segments for their own purposes, rather than these continuing to be available as shared infrastructure;
• the gradual dominance of virtual private networks (VPNs) running over the open public Internet. This creates the risk that the bandwidth available for the open communications component may reduce, choking response times; and
• reduced investment in bandwidth, as a result of corporations being unable to find business models that ensure return on investment, and hence the failure of the infrastructure to sustain the traffic.

There is no guarantee that the underlying protocols (especially TCP, IP and DNS), and the processes whereby they are maintained, will survive in their current form. A revised version of the IP protocol, IPv6, is now operational in what is usually referred to as Internet 2 (Montfort 1999), but whether this will be retro-fitted to the open, public Internet is not yet certain. Moreover, its impacts if it is widely implemented are far from clear.

It would be entirely feasible, for example, to adapt Internet architecture to support broadcast. The experimental MBone protocol did just this for radio transmissions. The risk is that powerful media organisations, supported by advertisers trying to sustain the old-fashioned direct marketing way of life that broadcast media created, may force change in Internet architecture that undermines interactivity in order to enable broadcast-mode transmissions.

Finally, if the net continues to avoid attempts to control it, governments and corporations may, in collaboration, invent a new set of protocols. These might severely restrict the freedoms that threaten the powerful institutions, and force traffic onto new networks that implement the prospective, new, power-friendly protocols, resulting in the collapse of the Internet as it has been known since the early 1990s.

There has been speculation that Microsoft's latest attempt to take advantage of its market dominance, in the form of Windows XP and related products such as Passport and Hailstorm, may signal a move to adapt the Internet Protocol (IP) layer to suit its own ends and those of its business partners, such as the U.S. and U.K. governments. See Procomp 2001, EPIC 2001b, and Cringely 2001.

Like the library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, the future information infrastructure may be devised to deny access to information rather than to enable it.

Will electronic technologies revert to a virtual form of the centralist notion, and thereby hand victory to the authoritarianism of the powerful? The tension was summed up at the very beginning of the open, public Internet era by the caption: 'It's the FBIs, NSAs, and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling movement of Cypherpunks, civil libertarians, and millionaire hackers. At stake: Whether privacy will exist in the 21st century.' (Levy 1993)

One approach is for the public to use the freedoms that are available, before it's too late. This means activism, and organised movements to discredit, undermine and defeat manoeuvres of an authoritarian nature. Advice on the techniques and tools of virtual activism is provided by sites such as Net Action.

Activism needs to focus on key elements of the new economy and society, such as open source, open content, freedom of access to cryptography, and P2P technologies. A specific movement is the Public Library of Science, which is seeking to recapture scientific publications from the grasp of publishing companies. (See also Harnad 2001.)

This is in part a question of political economy; but technology may play a role. There is already a category of tools commonly referred to as privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). One fundamental example is the use of cryptography to protect the content of messages while they are in transit, and the content of computer-based files.

A much more vital category of PET comprises tools that enable anonymity, taking advantage of features and potentials within the existing infrastructure. They were anticipated in literature (especially Brunner 1975), and occupy the spare time of many fringe-dwellers on the net; but some tools are being developed by large, respectable corporations. See IPCR 1995, Clarke 1999d, Kling et al. 1999 and EPIC 2001a. These tools appear to have caused the U.S. Government sufficient concern that it has gained a patent for a key technique whereby the identities of message senders and receivers can be protected (US Patent 6,266,704, Onion Routing, of 24 July 2001). It is to be expected that this will be utilised in order to deny corporations the right to implement the technique.

There is a need for a concept broader than PETs, such as freedom-enhancing technologies (FrETs?). Examples that already exist are Freenet, and the other 'peer-to-peer' (P2P) arrangements, which subvert the intended central control of digital resources and enable them to be shared around the community. See Clarke 2000d and Wired 2000, but also Clarke (2001a).

Although large corporations have generally been slow to perceive business opportunities in privacy-enhancing and freedom-enhancing technologies, many small, motivated, risk-taking companies have been very active, combining an almost religious zeal for liberty with the desire to apply venture capitalists' money to socially worthwhile undertakings.

The business sector is likely to be an ally, at least for a short period of time, for another reason as well. The measures being passed into law entrench the power of existing large corporations. In doing so, they stifle not only 'theft' and 'the enablement of theft', but also 'innovation'. This anti-competitive dimension will attract the opprobrium of innovative corporations whose own activities are challenged by the restrictive laws. Gradually, the dynamic growth companies are likely to start looking more attractive to politicians than the dinosaur publishing houses; and the freedom-constraining laws will at first be less enthusiastically applied, then ignored, and finally washed out of the statute books by next-generation laws.

A further possibility is maverick states (which in the near future might as well be virtually as geographically defined). There are two reasons for the survival of maverick states (as presaged, once again, by Brunner). One is that some people manage to find cracks in any authoritarian edifice, and the powerful are too busy to commit resources to addressing the flea bites, or choose not to do so (in particular, because members of the elite use the same cracks). The other is that one element of the calculus of authoritarianism is the perception of an enemy, and maverick nations fulfil a role as that which needs to be hated.

There remains another alternative, which might be dubbed 'the American way'. In The New York Times of Sunday December 8, 1996, Thomas Friedman coined the epithet that 'no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other'. This is a much-travelled and not altogether supportable hypothesis (and since the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Friedman's attention has transferred to Starbucks). Nonetheless, there is a real chance that increasing prosperity and economic interdependence may make both armed conflict and authoritarianism less common. Applied to the Internet, the proposition is that 'by building a state-of-the-art Internet, Beijing may have set an irreversible course' - away from authoritarianism and towards some form of democracy, and presumably of capitalism as well (Sheff 2001).

Many people, both within and outside the U.S.A., are likely to baulk at the dependence of 'the American way' on profit as the sole arbiter of good judgement. A gentler argument might be based less on positivist economics and more on political economics and even social ethics. For example, as was the case with the copying of films using VCRs, the present 'copyright owner-supremacist' positions being afforded to publishers might very rapidly come to be seen as dysfunctional, because they place serious constraints on innovation. If so, each new set of anti-authoritarian measures might need only to gain enough momentum to become credible, in order that the tide might be turned, and authoritarian measures rescinded.

This author's misgivings about whether anti-authoritarian measures will be adequate are not shared by John Perry Barlow. He reflected the ebullience of American libertarianism when he confidently declared not only that P2P could not be defeated by the RIAA and its friends in the U.S. government, but also that: "We've won the revolution. It's all over but the litigation. While that drags on, it's time to start building the new economic models that will replace what came before" (Barlow 2000).

This underlines a further weakness in the analyses of Barlow and his fellow EFF Directors, and of Lessig (1999). Their U.S.-centrism and inadequate appreciation of international differences leads them to assume that the dynamic balance that exists in the U.S.A. will be reflected in other countries. But the U.S. Constitution includes a Bill of Rights, whereas few other countries have such a substantial countervailing power against the inevitable drift towards authoritarianism. Whether or not they will work in the U.S.A., the solutions that Barlow and Lessig champion simply will not work for the perhaps 50% of Internet activity, and 95% of the world's population, to be found outside its borders.

Idealistically, one could call for a wider appreciation of the need for balance between the interests of law and order, on the one hand, and freedoms on the other; and for non-deployment of excessively threatening technologies. Unfortunately, the power lies substantially in the hands of the law-and-order community, and balance is a forlorn hope, unless very substantial countervailing power is somehow brought to bear.

Another means of achieving balance would be to invest significant resources in the development of tools for pseudonymity. Such technology would lie between anonymity (and its scope for accountability to be undermined by the absence of any means of applying retribution to guilty parties), and ubiquitous identification (which renders everyone's behaviour subject to transparency, and people's locations subject to real-time discovery, resulting in the chilling of nonconformist behaviour).

Far from the halcyon days that John Perry Barlow foresaw, there exists a real prospect of a new Dark Ages, arising from a successful counterreformation driven by partnerships of governments and corporations, spearheaded by the self-appointed policeman of the free world.

This first decade of the new century will see critical battles fought between the old guard and the new. Networks are only one of the battlegrounds. Technologies of repression are rampant, including the embedment of person location and tracking in consumer-carried devices, the imposition of general-purpose identification schemes, and the uncontrolled application of biometrics. Globalisation is seeing the wane of the power of nation-states, and increasing dominance of the polity by corporations.

Will the forces of authority, sponsored by corporations, win these battles? If so, the future has already been largely foretold by the anti-utopian novelists (in particular, Gibson 1984), and their accounts merely need to be updated.

Will consumers and citizens create countervailing power against the authority of the government-corporation complex? If so, they'd better hurry.

One hope for freedom may be the conflicts of interest within and between governments, within and between corporations, and between governments and corporations. People may need to encourage the ongoing divisions among the powerful players, in order to provide sufficient scope for freedoms to survive.

A key theatre will be the information infrastructure. If the architecture is adapted to support surveillance, then authoritarianism has largely won the war. Resistance is being led by people with technical capabilities (often referred to, disparagingly, as 'nerds'); but the strong likelihood is that the ravages of the authorities will stimulate more effective coalitions between politically-minded and technically-oriented groups. Our desire to live in interesting times seems very likely to be fulfilled.

Acknowledgements

I have benefited for over six years from interactions within the Internet policy-watchers' community in Australia (Link List Home Page). While developing the arguments in this paper, I greatly appreciated the encouragement and constructive criticism of the Editor of this Special Issue, Mark Pegrum, and of my colleague, Graham Greenleaf.

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Underlying Resources

This paper has been prepared on the basis of a long series of prior research and publications. Many references to the broader literature are to be found in these papers. The papers are variously refereed, invited, contributed, and self-published. Not all are directly referenced in the text of the article.

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Clarke, R. (1994e) 'Human Identification in Information Systems: Management Challenges and Public Policy Issues', Information Technology & People 7, 4 (December), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/HumanID.html

Clarke, R. (1995a) 'Net-ethiquette: Mini Case Studies of Dysfunctional Human Behaviour on the Net' (April), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/Netethiquettecases.html

Clarke, R. (1995b) 'Information Technology & Cyberspace: Their Impact on Rights and Liberties', Invited Presentation to the 'New Rights' Seminar Series, Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, Melbourne (13 September), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/VicCCL.html

Clarke, R. (1996a) 'Trails in the Sand' (18 May), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/Trails.html

Clarke, R. (1996b) Book Review of Mark Dery's Escape Velocity (13 July), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/EscVel.html, republished in slightly modified form in Information Technology & People 10, 1.

Clarke, R. (1996c) 'Cyberculture: Towards the Analysis That Internet Participants Need' (18 December), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/CyberCulture.html

Clarke, R. (1997a) 'Regulating Financial Services in the Marketspace: The Public's Interests', Australian Securities Commission Conference on 'Electronic Commerce: Regulating Financial Services in the Marketspace', Sydney (4-5 February), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/ASC97.html

Clarke, R. (1997b) 'Encouraging Cyberculture', Proceedings of CAUSE in Australasia '97, Melbourne (13-16 April), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/EncoCyberCulture.html

Clarke, R. (1997c) 'The Neighbourhood' (17 March), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/Neighbourhood.html

Clarke, R. (1997d) 'The Monster from the Crypt: Impacts and Effects of Digital Money', Proceedings of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference (CFP '97), San Francisco (12-14 March), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/CFP97.html; revised version presented as a Keynote speech at QuestNet'97, Brisbane (4 July), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/Monster.html

Clarke, R. (1997e) 'Public Interests on the Electronic Frontier: Their Relevance to Policy-Formation for I.T. Security Techniques', Invited Address to I.T. Security '97, Canberra (14-15 August); republished in Computers & Law, no.35 (April 1998), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IIRSecy97.html

Clarke, R. (1997f) 'Chip-Based ID: Promise and Peril', Proceedings of the International Conference on Privacy, Montreal (23-26 September), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/IDCards97.html

Clarke, R. (1997g) 'Instrumentalist Futurism: A Tool for Examining I.T. Impacts and Implications' (6 October), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/InstFut.html

Clarke, R. (1998a) 'The Internet as a Postal Service: A Fairy Story' (14 February), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/InternetPS.html

Clarke, R. (1998b) 'Information Privacy on the Internet: Cyberspace Invades Personal Space', Telecommunication Journal of Australia 48, 2 (May/June), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/IPrivacy.html

Clarke, R. (1998c) 'A Brief History of the Internet in Australia', at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/OzIHist.html

Clarke, R. (1999a) 'Bigger Than Y2K, Much More Pressing Than a Constitutional Preamble, I-I-I-It's "Internet Issues"', presentation to staff of the Australian Intellectual Property Office (24 March), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/Issues99.html

Clarke, R. (1999b) 'Electronic Trading in Copyright Objects and Its Implications for Universities', Proceedings of the EDUCAUSE '99 Conference (18-21 April), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/CAUSE99.html

Clarke, R. (1999c) 'The Willingness of Net-Consumers to Pay: A Lack-of-Progress Report', Proceedings of the 12th International EC Conference, Bled, Slovenia (7-9 June), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/WillPay.html

Clarke, R. (1999d) 'Anonymous, Pseudonymous and Identified Transactions: The Spectrum of Choice', Proceedings of the IFIP User Identification & Privacy Protection Conference, Stockholm (14-15 June), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/UIPP99.html

Clarke, R. (1999e) 'Current Developments in Internet Privacy', Proceedings of the IIR Conference on Data Protection and Information Privacy, Sydney (31 August), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/ICurr9908.html

Clarke, R. (1999f) '"Information Wants to be Free"', at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IWtbF.html

Clarke, R. (1999g) 'Freedom of Information? The Internet as Harbinger of the New Dark Ages', Proceedings of the Conference on 'Freedom of Information and the Right to Know', Melbourne (19-20 August); republished in First Monday 4, 11 (November 1999), at https://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_11/clarke/; also at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/DarkAges.html

Clarke, R. (1999h) 'Person-Location and Person-Tracking: Technologies, Risks and Policy Implications', Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Privacy and Personal Data Protection, Hong Kong (13-15 September); revised version published in Information Technology & Privacy 14, 2 (summer 2001), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/PLT.html

Clarke, R. (1999i) 'Relevant Characteristics of Person-Location and Person-Tracking Technologies' (September/30 October), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/PLTApp.html

Clarke, R. (1999j) 'Ethics and the Internet: The Cyberspace Behaviour of People, Communities and Organisations', Proceedings of the 6th Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics, Canberra (2 October); revised version published in Business & Professional Ethics Journal 18, 3&4 (1999), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IEthics99.html

Clarke, R. (2000a) 'Beyond the OECD Guidelines: Privacy Protection for the 21st Century' (4 January), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/PP21C.html

Clarke, R. (2000b) 'E-Consent: A Key Issue in the New E-Context', KPMG Conference, Barossa Valley (2 May), PowerPoint slides

Clarke, R. (2000c) 'Famous Nyms' (June/29 November), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/FamousNyms.html

Clarke, R. (2000d) 'File-Discovery and File-Sharing Technologies (aka Peer-to-Peer or P2P): MP3, Napster and Friends, and Their Impact on E-Publishing of Music, and Other Digital Objects' (30 July/12 August 2001), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/FDST.html

Clarke, R. (2000e) 'Stephen King and E-Publishing' (July/8 March 2001), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/KingEP.html

Clarke, R. (2000f) 'How to Ensure That Privacy Concerns Don't Undermine e-Transport Investments', Proceedings of the AIC e-Transport Conference, Melbourne (27-28 July), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/eTP.html

Clarke, R. (2000g) 'Technologies of Mass Observation', 'Mass Observation Movement' Forum, Melbourne (26 October), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/MassObsT.html

Clarke, R. (2000h) 'Conventional Public Key Infrastructure: An Artefact Ill-Fitted to the Needs of the Information Society' (13 November), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/PKIMisFit.html

Clarke, R. (2001a) 'DRM Will Beget DCRM', Position Paper for the W3C DRM Workshop, Sophia Antipolis, France (22-23 January), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/DCRM.html

Clarke, R. (2001b) 'While You Were Sleeping ... Surveillance Technologies Arrived', Australian Quarterly 73, 1 (January-February), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/AQ2001.html

Clarke, R. (2001c) 'Roger Clarke's PITs and PETs Resources Site' (February/6 April), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/PITsPETsRes.html

Clarke, R. (2001d) 'Why Would M-Marketing be Trusted by Consumers and Small Enterprises??' PowerPoint slides for AMTA Congress, Sydney (27 February), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/AMTA01.ppt

Clarke, R. (2001e) 'Introducing PITs and PETs: Technologies Affecting Privacy', Privacy Law & Policy Reporter 7, 9 (March), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/PITsPETs.html

Clarke, R. (2001f) 'Biometrics and Privacy' (15 April), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/Biometrics.html

Clarke, R. (2001g) 'The Fundamental Inadequacies of Conventional Public Key Infrastructure', Proceedings of the Conference ECIS'2001, Bled, Slovenia (27-29 June), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/ECIS2001.html

Clarke, R. & Dempsey, G. (2000) 'The Feasibility of Regulating Gambling on the Internet', forthcoming in Managerial and Decision Economics, at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/FeasIGR.html

Clarke, R., Dempsey, G., Ooi, C.N. & O'Connor, R.F. (1998a) 'A Primer on Internet Technology' (15 February), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IPrimer.html

Clarke, R., Dempsey, G., Ooi, C.N. & O'Connor, R.F. (1998b) 'Technological Aspects of Internet Crime Prevention', Proceedings of the Conference on 'Internet Crime', Australian Institute for Criminology, Melbourne (16-17 February), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/ICrimPrev.html

Clarke, R., Dempsey, G., Ooi, C.N. & O'Connor, R.F. (1998c) 'The Technical Feasibility of Regulating Gambling on the Internet', Proceedings of the Conference on Gambling, Technology & Society, Sydney (7-8 May), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IGambReg.html

Clarke, R., Higgs, P. & Dempsey, G. (2000) 'Key Design Issues in Marketspaces for Intellectual Property Rights', Proceedings of the 13th International EC Conference, Bled, Slovenia (19-21 June), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/Bled2K.html

Clarke, R. & Nees, S. (2000) 'Technological Protections for Digital Copyright Objects', Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS'2000), Vienna (3-5 July), at https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/TPDCO.html

Clarke, R. & Worthington, T. (1994) 'Vision for a Networked Nation: The Public Interest in Network Services', Proceedings of the Conference of the International Telecommunications Society, Sydney, at https://www.acs.org.au/president/1997/acsnet/acsnet.htm