NITs, Surveillance, and Monitoring

In many respects, the same fundamental characteristics that make NITs good at giving users the opportunity to produce information and to collaborate online also make NITs good at monitoring and tracking what users are doing online.

Remember the major characteristics of New Information Technologies. They are:

• Digital: Information is converted into computer-readable formats consisting of electronic signals. Digitization makes information compact (meaning it can be transmitted quickly and stored easily), easily duplicated and uniform (information formats are the same as far as the computer is concerned).
• Networked: Linked in an inter-connected and inter-dependent system.
• Interactive: Communication is generally two-way rather than one-way.
• Socio-Technical: The characteristics of the system are based both on technical elements (what tools can do) and on social elements (what people choose to do or to allow).

We have seen how digitization allows users to communicate quickly and effectively, with a variety of formats; how networking and interactivity allow them to communicate individually (one to one) or collectively (one to many or many to many) to anyone on the network, and how communities can contribute to or be promoted by online communication.

Now consider the following:

• Interactivity: Whenever you go online, your computer is engaged in two-way communication with any other computer you try to connect to, and also with intermediary computers (the ones between you and the computer you are connecting to). Everything you do online, every site you visit, every email you send, requires a two-way sharing of information. This is a fundamental characteristic of how the internet works.
• Networking: Computer networks allow individual computers to connect individual users through that network. In turn, multiple networks are interconnected. Anytime you enter a local network or use that network to connect to another network, information about what you are doing is by necessity shared across those networks.
• Digitization: Because digital information is computer-readable, it is easy to save and easy to analyze. Anytime you search for a particular term in a search engine, every time you visit a particular web address, anytime you download a particular file or type of file, your action creates a “digital footprint,” a record of what you did. For someone with access to the records of what is done on your network, it would be relatively simple to set up a program to notify the network administrator of when you took a particular action and call attention of administrators to that fact. Digitization means that much surveillance can be done without direct human intervention.
• Socio-Technical Networks: A computer system is not just a collection of machines and wires. It is a managed system that is administered by people. When you go online, you are accessing the network through a system managed by someone. Often your access to the internet brings you into contact with multiple systems managed by private businesses, universities, NGOs, governments, and so on.

Common forms of internet surveillance and monitoring:

• Monitoring internet browsing
• Cookies
• Monitoring email
• Spoofing
• Internet and email filtering
• Blocking by Domain Name Server (DNS)
• Blocking by Internet Protocol (IP)
• Blocking by keywords
• DNS hijacking