Freedom from warrantless, arbitrary searches and all-pervasive state surveillance and suspicion were defining principles of life for citizens in the West, or so one might naively once have thought. But so much of our modern lives is spent online, and this year, Australia, Canada, Britain and the US have seen a curiously coincidental effort to have the motherlode of surveillance laws thrust upon their peoples, with private companies bade to store and surrender every byte of online data to state spies, on demand, without a warrant.

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In the US, a veritable battle of bills is going on. Following the Stop Online Piracy Act, which allows the US to shut down entire internet domains and censor free speech in the name of enforcing copyright laws, in April the House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) bill, giving more cover to private companies when sharing individuals’ private and personal data and communications with the government, and also better enabling them to monitor individuals’ web usage, backed, tellingly, by Microsoft and Facebook. The Senate is supposedly against it, and even were it passed President Obama may veto it. But Obama’s record on civil rights and liberties includes having renewed the Patriot Act, keeping Guantanamó open and taking execution by drone to a new level. Obama backed Joe Liebermann’s 200-page Cybersecurity Act, designed to defend the US’ major computer networks and infrastructure against cyber attacks, but meanwhile giving greater legal impunity to companies to spy on web users – and share their data with the government.6 In early August, Republicans led the Senate vote down of this bill, much to Obama’s chagrin. But don’t thank the GOP for defending liberty. Their own SECURE IT Act of 2012 would enable and incentivise greater commercial and state surveillance of web usage – without establishing any government regulation or standard for security to cover infrastructure. The bill is currently batting around Congress.


It seems both the GOP and Democrats have become engrossed in stopping the other taking the legislative credit for fulfilling the real agenda set by the Pentagon, which has ‘formally recognized cyberspace as a new domain in warfare.’ This global domain, where we play on Facebook, socialize, pay tax or bank online, is just another theatre of war where we are all potential victims to any blow struck anytime from anywhere. Too often, our public servants – elected to safeguard our rights – end up serving the seedy agendas of state spies on the permanent public payroll; they consider us all equally tooled up as potential cyber enemies. So they seek to fight this paranoid perception by demolishing our real rights, with the legalized connivance of private companies. If we kick up enough we can remind politicians who they really serve. But we have to keep at it, time and time again.