This first part of this article series seemed to raise some strong feelings from you all, and I must ask that you please continue to respect other people’s cultures and beliefs when commenting. In part two I want to examine the west’s current approach to the Internet.

There have been several major Internet events in the last year that have raised all sorts of questions about the Internet freedoms we all enjoy, and what the future of the Internet should look like. The first of these was the WikiLeaks scandal where hundreds of thousands of secure military documents were ‘stolen’ by a soldier and later exposed.

Now one thing I’m not going to do here is get into a discussion about the leaks themselves, or how the Pentagon’s internal security allowed the documents to be appropriated in the first instance. It is interesting to note the US government’s initial response to the leaks however.

People were reported inside the Pentagon saying that it should not be possible to publish these types of documents on the Internet, and that governments should have greater control over what can and can’t be published online.

It’s very interesting this as, while this was probably a reaction resulting more from initial anger than reasoned judgement, we know that major western powers are thinking about this and that there are diametrically opposing viewpoints.

The French for instance recently passed a file sharing law that many countries in the European Union strongly disagree with, and the UK government has publicly stated that the Internet should not be constrained.

The UK is another interesting case. Here recently a premier league footballer had obtained what’s known as a “super-injunction” against a former reality television personality that he’d had an affair with. The reasons for the injunction are still not clear though blackmail has been suggested. Despite the British press doing their bit to maintain the injunction and not naming the footballer, hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter publicly outed him.

This has started a debate in the UK about our own laws but not in the context of constraining the Internet, quite the opposite in fact. The debate here has been about bringing UK law up to date so that it can accommodate the Internet.

This doesn’t mean that any new laws, if and when passed, won’t give greater powers to the authorities over finding the identities of people who break the law online so that they can be prosecuted. Indeed every Internet service provider in the UK, after 9/11 was required to fit a “black box” so that email traffic in the country can be monitored for crime and terrorism detection purposes. Many people opposed this at the time but the Labour government in power in the early 00′s got it through parliament.

Now I’m not going to speculate what freedoms we should all have online, you will decide that for yourself, but it’s becoming clear that there is a very strong debate going on in the west about the Internet and if it should be constrained. It’s still possible that some constraints will be put in place, all in the name of terrorism, crime and national security, and this will be a major battle-ground for people’s who have so far enjoyed unfettered access to what they want to see and do online.

In part 3 of this article series I’ll look at how the Internet is being used by criminals and terrorists, and also how major world powers are already using it in warfare.

WikiLeaks has now revealed that in 2008 the US State Department was in discussions with President Mubarak’s government about unblocking an Egyptian blogger who had apparently been trying to expose police abuses in the country.

In the cable, an extract from which you can see below, the US describe the blogger as a “Human-rights activist”.

The Egyptian police have had particular criticism in the last week because of the heavy-handed approach they took with protesters.  This is unlike the Egyptian army which said it would not interfere with protesters and would restrict itself to protecting important buildings.

The cable doesn’t reveal why the two videos were removed, though given that the US State Department had to contact the Egyptian government we can probably guess.

While the US and Egypt have been close allies for years now, efforts are still being made to restore full Internet and other data services to the country but companies such as Google and Twitter have stepped in to allow some people to get messages out of the country in recent days.

There’s no confirmation on whether this was intentional or not, but it comes at a time of increased sensitivity over cyber-terrorism.

Among websites who had traffic diverted were the US Senate, The Office of the Secretary of Defence, NASA and the US Commerce Department.

A draft report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission says “Evidence related to this incident does not clearly indicate whether it was perpetrated intentionally and, if so, to what ends.  However, computer security researchers have noted that the capability could enable severe malicious activities.”

The Internet, such as it is, is at some risk of attacks that could threaten national infrastructure and so countries around the world have been working on methods of defending their Internet servers from such threats.  A recent attack was, allegedly, made on Iran and saw plants in the country experiencing significant disruption.  There is no evidence of who was responsible for the attack though it is widely considered that only a major power would have the resources to instigate such a project.

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The FBI worked with police and security agencies right around the world.  The UK police confirmed that more people had been detained the Ukraine.  Other countries involved included the Netherlands.

The US Attorney General said that those arrested in the US had been charged with conspiracy to commit bank-fraud and money laundering.  They acted as go-betweens providing bank accounts for the criminals to deposit stolen money in.

The FBI added that the crime ring had attempted to steal $220m by obtaining usernames and passwords for bank account details.

The arrests are the culmination of an investigation that began in May 2009 when FBI agents noticed a string of suspicious bank transactions.

In the UK, 19 suspected members of the ring were arrested and Ukranian police arrested 5 people suspected of directing the scheme.

The bill was introduced by three Democratic senators to protect data from random searches. The news article is not clear in at least two areas and requires further analysis. The article mentions law-abiding Americans a few time and one could interpret that the new bill will only protect data of US citizens from being searched randomly.

The second issue that is not clear if the bill only protects data on laptops or data on all digital devices such as mobile phones, PDAs or iPods. An article published on The Register seven days ago confirmed that the new bill will prevent

According to a Register article that was published a week ago the new bill will affect any electronic devices from being searched randomly at US borders. The article seems to imply that this affects all visitors and not only US citizens.