Does Using an Anonymous Service Make You a Terrorist?

It's late at night, you're tired, you should go to bed but your eye catches sight of another interesting link.  As a graduate in religious studies you've always been fascinated by the affect that religion can have on people.  You're using an anonymous service so perhaps it won't hurt to have a little look at that Jihadist fundamentalist forum and see if you can remember any arabic.

So what's the shocking part of that statement, well in my mind, it's simple, the very fact that someone feels they need to use an anonymous service to browse the web!  But unfortunately it is true, without any background information the surfer above is simply an IP address who keeps accessing Muslim Fundamentalist Web Sites. That IP address can easily be traced and is logged in many places not least the ISP you use to connect to the internet.

Recently a European Directive was passed which stated that all ISPs should keep all their logs for two years, many governments have plans to centralise this information on a database and make it 'available' to specific agencies.  Quite honestly it scares me a lot, the gradual loss of our privacy, our freedom of thought and expression just in case we happen to be up to no good.

My example may be a little extreme, but in a binary world of bits and bytes the surfer above looks very like an Islamic Fundamentalist meeting his buddies to plan some horrible act of violence. The reality is of course some what different.

The 'If you've got nothing to hide" argument.

Is the usual defence for spying on us, unfortunately I don't find it a very good argument.  It's almost like you're presuming everyone is guilty and are just waiting for them to do something wrong.  Of course my example above is an extreme one but there's loads of other possibilities.   Maybe I am visiting Alcoholics Anonymous and trying to get my life in order, who should know that?   Which Government agencies need to know that ? Maybe I have some depressive illness, problems with debts, a fondness for dressing up in mini-skirts and stilletos!

You can find an awful lot about a person from their web browsing, but what do you do with this information when you have it?  It's a dangerous and slippery slope that many people are getting worried about, it's easy to gradually lose your privacy and freedom of speech but much harder to get that freedom back 

I'm convinced that the very small possibility of catching the odd dumb terrorist and evil doer is not worth the cost of losing our privacy and putting all our personal information at risk.  That's why I do use an anonymous service to surf securely, mostly I'm concerned about the threat of identity thieves but blocking all my information from Governments and ISPs feels pretty good as well.

But on a slightly ironic note I'll give some slightly amusing information, lots and lots of people using these Jihad web sites and forums use anonymous proxies to protect their identity.  Unfortunately this plan doesn't really work as the anonymous proxy only blocks your IP from registering on the target web site nothing else.  So they are only anonymous to the Jihad web site, everyone else can see where they've been browsing, this is generally what you should expect if you try to use something for free on the internet instead of a proper anonymous service.