Opinion: Get ready for global surveillance

Despite our best attempts to squelch the desire of business and government to monitor our moves online, in the end Big Brother will prevail on the web, says Simon Moores.

I was comfortably settled watching last week's Money Programme on the subject of Google and its business, when the phone rang. To my surprise it was BBC News, who wanted me to come into the studio to discuss Google's defiant refusal to surrender a week's worth of its search records to Uncle Sam, who wished to know if an analysis of the same would support the resurrection of some Clinton-era anti-pornography legislation.

It was the same day, strangely enough, that I installed the Google Desktop on my computer, the software I warned PC users to avoid when it first appeared last year for personal security reasons. This is not to say that I'm vindicating Google Desktop but I'm prepared to balance the security risks against its more general utility, now that the well-publicised post-launch bugs have been ironed out.

In fact, I now assume by default that my computer behaviour is likely to be tracked by someone at some unspecified level of granularity - and should government be particularly interested in my visits to the Al-Jazeera website or BathtimeBabes.com, then Big Brother is going to find out, regardless of how hard the owners of the search data try and resist the inevitable.

George Orwell's 1984, one might argue, has finally arrived, 22 years late. Ironically it's Google that may yet find itself forced into the position of playing Big Brother, dancing to the tune of governments that, like those of China and the US, would rather like to know more about the surfing habits of their citizens.

The book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, written during the commercial genesis of the internet by law professor Lawrence Lessig, argued that the ungoverned virtual world of the internet would find it impossible to avoid the introduction of an 'architecture of control'. This would come about as government and business attempted to mitigate and manage the risks that accompanied the sudden opening of a Pandora's Box of new freedoms and individual expression on a par with the introduction of the printed books and pamphlets that fuelled the Reformation of 16th century Europe.

Next month, I'm speaking at a pan-Arab government conference, in a part of the world where the rapid growth of the internet increasingly supports the concept of the 'Umma'. This is a universal, Islamic community that dissolves the frontiers between the lands of the faithful and the non-believers, and where the authority of the Sharia and fatwa system can now be experienced through the websites of respected religious figures in Iran, Iraq or Saudi Arabia.

Within this rapidly expanding online community - which includes weblogs such as the Saudi-based Religious Policeman - an often dissident and young online population can express itself on a multitude of websites that threaten the finely balanced political status of a number of regimes. What will happen, I ask, if one day, instead of one per cent, 40 per cent of the population of the greater Arab world have access to the internet - and find their imagination and growing transnational sense of identity harnessed and centrally directed by the ideas they may find on the web?

This is of course why governments of the free world and the not-so-free world want to place the equivalent of CCTV and speed cameras across the front door of cyberspace - Google and a handful of other global portal sites - in much the same manner as the new camera on the only road in and out of Birchington captures the vehicles details of all the passing traffic.

Surveillance of the roads is a fact of life that we now take for granted in the increasingly Orwellian Britain of the 21st century. Although companies like Google may seek to challenge a government's right to internet traffic information, the very existence of such data makes these fishing expeditions unavoidable.

Over time, governments - playing the national security card - will prevail and the web will become as much an integral part of the global surveillance society as the camera now innocuously sited on the A228.

As George Orwell wrote: "Big brother is watching you."