Nate Anderson’s ‘Internet Police’ - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/nate-andersons-internet-police.html?nl=books
Yet the Internet has always been a murky, unaccountable place, as much a delightful Shangri-La as an anarchic shadow world, rife with fraud, pornography, drug and human trafficking networks and, of course, spam. In “The Internet Police,” Nate Anderson, deputy editor at the technology Web site Ars Technica, describes how order has been erratically imposed on the chaos. It’s a tale filled with plot twists. Government overreach leads to judicial pushback. Private-sector innovation enables the cops, but also the criminals. Internet utopians resent the intrusion of old-world laws on what they had hoped would remain an untrammeled new world. The latest technology renders traditional methods like wiretap laws obsolete. But no one can finish this book thinking the Internet remains a disorderly wasteland. The West is being tamed, if slowly.