Ever had the feeling you're being watched? Or that someone's listening into your telephone calls? Reading your faxes? Rummaging around in your computer files while you're online? Or invading your privacy in some other way, but you're not really sure how? Well, you're quite right. They are.
Welcome to Cyberspace.

This is the place where the words extolling our great good fortune to be part of the Information Age roll off the tongue with ease. We are told they represent all our tomorrows: the Internet, the World Wide Web, Digital Communications, Computer Networks, Integrated Systems, E-mail, TV-mail, mobile phones and a flickering PC screen in every workplace and millions of homes. And the prophets of boom reckon, to quote Ronald Reagan, we ain't seen nothing yet!

So why should we worry? Investigative author John Parker has been shining a light into some of the darker corners of cyberspace. He has discovered a veritable morass... sinister, sly and downright illegal activities that can be summed up in four words: Personal privacy is dead.

Parker has combined original research and open source information with personal testimonies from many named sources from across Europe, North America and Australasia to answer key questions: Who is being targeted? Who are the new spies? How widespread is surveillance of the unsuspecting general public? And what information do 'they' hold on you?

Parker's findings are as intriguing as they are disturbing: a society subjected to increasing levels of surveillance from every direction. We are being watched, filmed, listened to, recorded, tracked, entered on databases and put on lists. We have become targets for eavesdroppers, government and private agents, big business, security officers, law enforcement agencies, computer hackers, crooks, fraudsters, paedophiles, organised crime and terrorists all equipped with a daunting array of electronic gear. John Parker names them and the systems: from basic CCTV, through workplace surveillance and on into the murky world of international intelligence networks such as the world's largest spy station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire run by the National Security Agency of American, creator of the Echelon system that is used to routinely intercept telephone calls, faxes or e-mail anywhere in the world. Echelon has been used to spy on major multi-nation companies, individuals such as Robert Maxwell, European trades unions and US congressmen. It kept a virtual permanent eye on Princess Diana, especially during her final days with Dodi Fayed and enabled US Intelligence to amass a small library of 'Top Secret' records on her, other members of the British Royal family and pretty well any other person, famous or not, they cared to target. And under long standing agreements, the information may be shared with British agencies. Their techniques have been picked up and used by private and commercial enterprise around the world to the point we will all soon be subjected to TOTAL SURVEILLANCE.

Big Brother is no longer fiction. CCTVs, electronic databases, even email interceptors are being used to monitor virtually every aspect of our daily lives. If you thought that, because you are not a criminal, you are safe from surveillance you are wrong. Details of your personal finances, where you work, even what medication you take may be monitored by growing
numbers of large corporations, government and private agencies for their own purposes.

* The alarming effect computer technology has had on our privacy

* The secret worldwide listening operation operated by the UK and US involving MI5, GCHQ and the Secret Intelligence Service (M16)

* What today's spies do - and who they investigate

* Details of the world's largest spy station - Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire - and the extraordinary capabilities of the Echelon system

* Why the Data Protection Act is too little, too late

Copyright © John Parker 2004
Site design: Chris Mitchell