Effect internet crime in Politics

hellO everyone...(yatie)^^
Thanks nani, now I want to share about the effect of internet crime in Politics...

~The Internet began in the 1970s as an academic computer science experiment funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. It proved valuable to researchers, and that value was recognised by research funding agencies, which continued to directly support it well into the 1990s. A time-line of Internet development is provided by RFC2235.

~Academic usage of the Internet came to extend well beyond the computer science discipline. In Australia, the Internet migrated at the end of 1989 from a mere research object to a fully professional service, AARNet. Gradual uptake by new communities (at first of scholars, and later in government, in industry and among society generally), together with successive new protocols and tools, has resulted in exponential growth in connected nodes, in traffic, and in users, being sustained over more than two decades.

~Because such a substantial proportion of the population of computers and users has already been attracted onto the `net, growth in those measures will necessarily gradually assume the shape of the logistics curve, i.e. with growth rates flattening out. Traffic, on the other hand, appears set to continue its rapid growth, as more people spend more time generating more messages; and as bandwidth-hungry image, sound and video-transmissions become more common. Statistical information is available on Internet growth-rates up to 1995 at Georgia Institute of Technology, and on subsequent host-count growth-rates at NetWizard.

~The innovation that brought the Internet squarely into public focus was the World-Wide Web, which began its explosive growth in 1993. The Web enables organisations and people everywhere to become publishers, and has resulted in a vast leap in the public availability of information. Retrospectively, many newcomers have discovered the benefits of pre-existing services, particularly email, but also file-transfer and newsgroups.

~In addition to the wide range of valuable services that it supports, the Internet in general, and particular Internet services, have been co-opted to meet the needs of less tasteful purposes. The result has been a reaction by some socially conservative people and organisations against the Internet per se.

Examples of areas in which public concern has been stimulated include:

• pornography generally, circulation of which is quite common using FTP and newsgroups;
• child pornography in particular; and
• the incitement of racial hatred / `hate-speech'.

In some countries, the Internet has generated even deeper reactionary feelings. Some governments have sought to stifle, and even prevent, the use of the Internet, because of its potential to support:

• the infiltration of foreign, western, secular, english-language and/or American culture, resulting in the erosion of traditional culture and values; and/or
• political activism (particularly in countries with traditions of limited freedom of speech, or with dictatorial regimes).

~Meanwhile, it is reasonably argued that `organised crime', terrorists, and `subversives' more generally, are using, or will soon use, the Internet for their own purposes. Law enforcement agencies are accordingly taking a closer look at the `net. They are seeking means of limiting its use for illegal purposes, as well as applying it to their own needs.

~A further initiative of relevance is the U.S. President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, which is concerned not only with energy, water, transportation and essential services, but also with communications. It was particularly concerned about `new cyber threats'. Its report of 20 October 1997 identified `a wide spectrum of threats', including:

• natural events and accidents;
• blunders, errors, and omissions;
• insiders;
• recreational hackers;
• criminal activity;
• industrial espionage;
• terrorism;
• (foreign) national intelligence; and
• information warfare.

~The threats to Internet freedom have, predictably enough, stimulated reactions by individuals and organisations who are opposed to the exercise of power by nation-states. The intellectually and technically most virile of these are loose coalitions associated with the terms `crypto-anarchist' and `cypherpunk'. Their arguments vary from the inevitability of the collapse of the nation-state as a result of cryptography, to the need for crypto-armed rebellion to destroy the nation-state.

~yatie@hayati~ A124337