As the Internet matures, more and more creative uses of the 'Net develop. Using online phone books and people-finding tools, refugees all over the world use the Internet to reconnect their families. In Kosovo, relief volunteers set up websites and distributed pamphlets to help reunite families who were separated during the fighting. In the Middle East, displaced Palestinians in refugee camps are able to use the Internet to communicate with family members.
Free speech and Internet usage is a difficult problem in some parts of the world. In China, despite government opposition, anti-government dissidents have used the Internet to spread their message. This has prompted the Chinese government to order Internet service providers to screen private emails for political content. The Chinese government suggests it will hold the companies responsible for subversive postings on their own websites.
The Internet has also served to bring a sense of community to expatriates living far away from their homelands. Great innovations have been made because of the wireless capability of the Internet - especially for the military and law enforcement. In the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, the U.S. military used handheld wireless computers to let soldiers know instantly where they were, where they needed to go, and where the enemy might be. Using orbiting satellites, soldiers view threedimensional digital landscape maps that give them a precise overview of the battlefield.
When American troops conducted a night raid that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein in December, 2003, digital technology allowed vehicles to be seen onscreen at a tactical operations center - a mini war room - where Army commanders watched every move from miles away.
Crime fighting has taken on new dimensions because of technology. Many U.S. and British towns have video cameras around busy downtowns and intersections to monitor crime. Most American police officers' vehicles are wired with sophisticated computers allowing the officer to quickly check a suspect's background.
Early in 2004, a seventeen-year-old California boy found his own picture on a missing children's website and discovered that he was allegedly abducted from Canada fourteen years ago by the woman that he believed was his mother.
The Internet's increased usage and the huge surge in the popularity of chat groups, particularly among teenagers, has led to great concern about the access sexual predators have to children. So, law enforcement and even vigilante groups have worked to catch these people, and state governments in the U.S. now post websites with lists of convicted sexual offenders and their addresses to warn communities.
In the United States, possessing photographs of a child engaging in a sex act is illegal, as is sending such photos over the Internet or downloading them onto a computer. So officers pretend to be teenage girls, chatting online with suspects and then luring them to a public place where an arrest can be made. Some law enforcement agencies have aggressively pursued this kind of internet policing, while others have gone so far as to arrest vigilantes.
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1. The Internet and the World Wide Web as social phenomenons and the New Media
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