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governments to control it strengthen. Despite habitual protests by civil servants and politicians that no such process is under way, the tortured and slow death of Internet privacy in the West, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, is a sad – albeit visible – reality and is probably inevitable.

The response to 9/11, in the name of combating terrorism, severely curtailed our freedom from state interference on the Web. The main tool in the US was the Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme, although even the Bush administration, with its congenital tin ear, eventually realised that the name had so many Orwellian associations that it should be renamed the Terrorism Information Awareness programme.

The TIA afforded DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and detection wing, considerable access to data gleaned from private communications. Although the programme was eventually closed down, many of its powers were retained by government and distributed among different agencies in the United States.

Elsewhere, in a landmark case, the Supreme Court consented to the FBI deploying key-logger trojans onto the computers of suspects, although under court supervision. This enabled the FBI to log everything that the suspect would do on his computer, just as the cyber criminal does when he infects a third-party computer with a key logger. At the turn of the millennium the European Parliament confirmed the existence of Echelon, the United States’s global spy programme that is allegedly capable of homing in on digital communications anywhere in the world.

In a directive issued under the UK’s presidency of the European Union, Internet Service Providers in Europe were obliged to start storing all computer traffic (this applies to mobile phones as well) for between six months and two years – data that a variety of governmental agencies can access under national legislation. If these moves towards digital surveillance continue, Western governments (usually in the name of anti-terrorism strategies and law enforcement) will be in an ever better position to monitor the movements and habits of their citizens.

Researchers at the London School of Economics best described our chosen path. In June 2009 they asked the reader to imagine:

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