How has the Internet been positioned as a surveillance tool?
This rhetoric of the Internet as freedom, excessive or not, was also accompanied by Internet rumors of the Internet as a dark machine of control. For many, Echelon—a shadowy intelligence network operated by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and stemming from the 1947 UKUSA agreement, in which the Anglo allies turned their antennas from Berlin to Moscow—epitomized the dangers of high-speed telecommunications networks, even though its exact capabilities (especially its ability to penetrate fiber optic networks) and goals remain unclear.3 For others, mysterious corporate cookies, allegedly capable of following our every move, or voracious packet sniffers epitomized the risk of going online. The Internet, rather than enabling freedom, enabled total control.
