There's long been concern about privacy on the Internet. What's different now is there is more criminal activity on the Internet.

A number of developments are happening on the Internet that AOL couldn't ignore.

Despite the dot-com meltdown, we found that the Internet is more vigorous than ever. Yet many issues of concern about the Internet remain from 2000, and new concerns have emerged in 2001.

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.

Since the 1970s, there has been a continual tendency to over-estimate the surveillance capacities of new technologies. In the sense of the physical invasion of privacy, surveillance comprises five sequential events: the capacity to observe; the act of observation; comprehension of what is seen; intervention on the basis of that knowledge; and a consequent change of behaviour by the subject. Too often the final four have been assumed from the possibility of the first.

A tech mandate requiring backdoors in the Internet endangers the privacy of innocent people, stifles innovation, and risks the Internet as a forum for free and open expression,