Civil Simian - Fixing the Internet; A call to action at thirty thousand feet

Fixing the Internet: A call to action at thirty thousand feet

By Shawn Rohrbach MFA

We need to protect the innocence of children and the overt trustworthiness of the elderly who use the internet, and the rest of us in between need to save us from ourselves. My generation created the internet the way it is and the generation that has followed has not made any significant corrections. We all saw how potentially risky the internet could be. We predicted some of the nefarious activity, and we built it any way. As we move forward, we need to held accountable as well as credited for the bad and the good. The problem is we need to make these corrections at thirty thousand feet and it may require installing new jet engines.
It is my generation that heralded the necessity of the personal computer and subsequent generations were raised with them until now they are ubiquitous figures of our culture. It is my generation that wrote the program that sends spam, and the following generations use it. It is my generation that invented data mining, and former students of mine use that every day. My generation, perhaps funded by a few members of the previous generation, discovered internet pornography is a multi billion dollar business opportunity and we made those web sites available to anyone with an internet connection. I don't see the Gen X or Y generations taking these sites down.
My generation also created an internet with ten billion web pages with information about virtually anything and often nothing. I can book a flight while I am lying in bed. I can look up restaurants in my city. I can find papers on Nano-technology and the most current theories of Hemingway's books. I can listen to my favorite radio stations in other cities and watch video of politicians making huge verbal mistakes by insulting people, not thinking their words would find their way to a video share site.
For fourteen dollars, I can intercept the electronic chat between lovers or enemies and in pure Orwellian voyeurism, watching them without ever being detected. I can easily pretend to be someone else on a computer in Slovenia and attack websites. I can harass teenagers I don't like harmfully, as in the recent case of the young girl who committed suicide while being bullied on MySpace. The middle aged mother who instigated this bullying walked with a wrist slap. The potential for doing harm and evil is often greater than any good we might enjoy from this magnificent tool.
We need to begin a long discussion not only in this country, but the world over on the power of the internet and the responsibility we have to use this power wisely.
It's not enough to focus on being wary of bogus check cashing schemes and virus infections from innocent web sites. There are many passive protection strategies that are at best barely effective. This is about the adults who use the internet to threaten the safety of others. Rather than being wary and putting up passive protections, we need to be pro-active.
I ran a spy-bot remover on a laptop I intentionally take off the fire wall for research purposes. I found five copies of a popular key-logger software application loaded on to my computer. I went to the web site for this product and read the glowing ad copy about how terrific it was parents could record everything their kids do on the internet. The problem is, this same application is perniciously loaded on to unsuspecting computers and the owner doesn't know about it. I tried to figure out where the key logging data was being sent, but removed it instead. I notified their customer support about the incident and they sent me auto response emails telling me how terrific the product is and it is a best of breed.
Internet safety begins with a commitment to keep the internet safe. I advocate a three pronged plan.
First, avoid the obviously risky activity on the internet. Using common sense you can live like the man I met who manages a city softball league. He claims he does not go out to buy anything except for groceries and gas and he has never been scammed or lost his financial identity in five years. I asked him his methodology and his message is simple; avoid the risk.
Second, let companies know you do not want their spam and do not give out information that would reveal your identity. Let your voice be heard; you will not tolerate their activity and if they persist you will avoid their products. Associates in the IT world brag often about how they turn these unsolicited emails into Denial of Service attacks or spam bombs, and this is simply illegal. Don't do to them what they do to you. If I am the only person demanding my information be kept private, they will only laugh. But if collectively users want to act to keep their on line transactions and data private, they will probably move on to some other pernicious method of flooding our lives with useless information, but at least we may make some gains in privacy.
I would never want to curtail the freedoms we enjoy when providing information on the internet; I am only advocating action on the part of the users who want to take control of their privacy and safety while accessing this information. Not using a product sends a clear message to the company making the product; we don't like what you are doing.
The final response I advocate is pro-actively challenging the evil on the internet. In a notable case, a twelve year old boy was asked to respond to remarks made by the President of the United States on the S-CHIP program that provided medical coverage to families in a specific income bracket. Several websites intentionally placed lies regarding the financial worth of the family and questioned their need for any assistance. The lies were quickly challenged and ultimately removed.
In the case of the twelve year old boy, one web site wrote inflammatory lies and published the family's address. I saw this and immediately expressed my concern to the web master of the site for the safety of that family. Making a political point in a free society had crossed the lines into creating an unsafe environment for children. The only possible response to that is a challenge to the lies and threats created by such statements.
It is easier to use the internet as a bully pulpit and make any kind of statement you like, no matter how false or threatening. It requires individuals to report threats, challenge lies and otherwise tell the source of this kind of information their behavior is unacceptable.
I wish there were no threats to your private data or to your person on the internet, but that is not the case. We are vulnerable whenever we log on. It's not enough to simply be aware of the threats and to take passive action to protect ourselves. This is the least effective protection. It is also not acceptable to undertake any illegal retaliation against a company or individual. What is left is a pro active approach to identifying spammers, data miners, identity thieves, sexual predators and liars and expose their offending behavior for what it is. The internet is not going to stop so we can convene a committee to recommend changes; it has to be done soon and at thirty thousand feet over Greenland.