This article in the Guardian (UK) below, shows how far the UK and the USA have gone in assuming state surveillance of emails. That is not under debate - only the range of the agencies allowed to monitor.
The implications for all radicals, let alone revolutionaries, using the internet have been known for a long time. But IMO are worth spelling out again for the issue of reform and revolution. No serious email list or web-site can afford to announce itself as genuinely revolutionary. All traffic to that site will be monitored and searched for patterns of those accessing it. These developments profoundly restrict bourgeois right. It will be very difficult if not impossible to resists in the climate of panic about the dirty bomb. Just as czarism was absolutism tempered by periodic assassination, so it seems we have the global hegemony of finance capital tempered by periodic terrorism. The only hope for genuinely revolutionary change in the world is if the genuine revolutionaries can operate within a much wider civil society in which they are on a continuum with radical reformers and reformists. They must be able to differentiate themselves, but not so antagonistically that they debar themselves from such forums. The pressure towards "legal marxism" cannot be denied. But in these circumstances Marxists need revisionists, revolutionaries need reformists, and socialists need liberals. The contradiction needs to be handled well if we are to accelerate global change, radical or revolutionary. http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/story/0,7369,735842,00.html >No 10 defends wider electronic surveillance > >Stuart Millar and Lucy Ward Wednesday June 12, 2002 The Guardian > >Downing Street yesterday defended plans to hand government departments, >local councils and other public bodies the power to demand the >communications records of British citizens, as opposition MPs denounced >the move as a serious threat to individual liberty. > >The Guardian revealed yesterday the details of a Home Office draft order >which seeks to expand the list of authorities empowered to obtain the >communications logs of every telephone, internet and email user, to >include seven Whitehall departments, every local authority in the country >and a host of NHS bodies and public organisations. > >If the order is approved by MPs next week each of these organisations will >be able, without a court order, to compel telephone companies and internet >service providers to hand over detailed personal information on individual >users when the data retention section of the Regulation of Investigatory >Powers Act (Ripa) comes into force, probably in August. > >Currently only police, the intelligence services, the inland revenue and >customs and excise have that power.
