Judy Rivers went to the bank with a simple request in April: She wanted to open a safe deposit box. The response, while equally simple, was a complete surprise. The bank turned her down. Why?

She was dead.

At least that's what the bank's security systems indicated. Sorry, a bank official said, we can't open an account for you. Rivers asked more questions but got only vague answers. An outside company indicated there was a problem with her Social Security number, she was told, but the bank wouldn't tell her the name of the firm.

"Needless to say, I was startled," said Rivers, 58, who lives in Jasper, Ala. And so began her digital murder mystery.

Rivers says her premature electronic demise has led to multiple denials of credit, difficulty accessing her own money and, at one point, a confrontation with police that nearly landed her in jail. She says she has been denied two job interviews because the firms could not validate her Social Security number. Still, she doesn't know why "the system" seems to want her dead. Read on to find out why you, too, can be declared dead at the whim of a few bits and bytes and find yourself in a true 21st-century nightmare.

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After the initial safe deposit box denial, Rivers was given only this hint about her tenuous situation — after much badgering, a bank official showed her a letter with this one-line statement, "This Social Security Number has been discontinued, the holder of this number was reported dead on August 3, 2008."

She had been dead for nearly two years, according to the system. What system? The bank wouldn't tell her.

So she headed down to the local Social Security office right away.

"They went through their systems and said, 'No, you are still alive,'" she recalls. "They said everything was fine on their end." The agency even gave her a letter identifying her as among the living, which she provided to msnbc.com. A check of the Social Security Administration's Master Death File, which is available to the public, also indicates that the agency does not report Rivers as dead.

So Rivers talked to a lawyer friend who suggested she apply for credit to see what would happen and to help determine the extent of the problem. As they suspected, she was rejected — 11 times.

Again, the rejection notices were vague. In one note from GE Money Bank, supplied to msnbc.com by Rivers, she is told that the firm was "unable to verify (her) Social Security number."

But as the rejections mounted, the consequences became more severe. At one point, she tried to pay for items at a retail store with her debit card, and the card was rejected. She tried a credit card, and that was rejected, too. The retailer called police, assuming she was an identify thief.

"I thought I was going to be led away in handcuffs," she said.

Cops let her go because her driver's license "checked out," she said, but they were unable to positively verify her identity. So they handed her credit and debit cards over to the store clerk and ordered the clerk to cut them up.

Because she is friendly with tellers at her bank branch, she has no trouble writing checks and cashing them there — but she was unable to get a replacement debit card. Same problem: The Social Security number couldn't be verified.

"No one would tell me the name of the company they had used to check me out ... and this had just blossomed all over the place," she said.

Rivers somehow managed to keep her sense of humor throughout. She had taken out a $6,000 car loan six months previously at the same bank and suggested one positive element of her premature demise.

"I asked them if, since I was dead, did that mean I didn't have to pay the money back? They didn't go for that," she said.

Chex Systems report has error
Finally, she got a small break when her lawyer friend found out that the bank used a firm named Chex Systems Inc. to run background checks on new customers. With a little snooping, she learned that Chex Systems is used by many financial institutions to verify identities during transactions and to help retailers spot consumers who've bounced checks in the past. She also learned she was entitled to see what records Chex Systems had about her through what's called a "consumer disclosure," the firm's version of a free annual credit report. She got her response on Aug. 18. There, on page 2, in black and white, was the bad news.

"Number inactivated due to report of death," it said, right next to her Social Security number.

And just below, there was a toll free number to call with disputes. She called immediately to make the case with Chex Systems that she was, in fact, alive.

"I got on the phone with an agent who sounded extremely upset that I would even question the validity of their report," she said. "He said I was reported dead on August 3, 2008."

Chex Systems, which is a subsidiary of Florida-based Fidelity National Information Services Inc., said in an e-mail to msnbc.com that it could not comment on a specific consumer's situation, citing privacy concerns, but it asserted that all death information comes "via a direct feed from the Social Security Administration."

"But they say I'm not dead," Rivers, exasperated by this obvious Catch-22, said. "I am at wit's end. ... As Chex Systems has passed this information to so many federal agencies and their clients, there is absolutely no way to tell who has the information and how to get all reports corrected."

For all intents and purposes, Rivers had suffered digital death, a near-fatal disease in our increasingly interconnected world.

After Rivers contacted msnbc.com looking for help, she tried to get her free annual copy of her credit report using the Web site AnnualCreditReport.com. The site indicated there was a problem with her credit record and recommended she request the report via U.S. mail. She's still awaiting the response.

Identity Theft Resource Center offers hope
Jay Foley, head of the Identity Theft Resource Center, suspects the answers that Rivers seeks will be found there. Digital death, while not common, isn't so unusual, he says.

"The most common cause of this is some smart guy trying to duck a debt collector by saying, 'I'm dead,'" he said. "And they get the number wrong."

It's true, Foley said: If a debt collector tells a credit bureau that a debtor is dead, that bureau will include the information in a credit report, and it will then filter through the entire credit system. There's no requirement for a death certificate, and — as with all credit bureau data — there's no fact-checking.

Foley said he's seen victims of digital death spend as long as 18 years trying to resuscitate their credit lives.

Two years ago, an msnbc.com investigation found that the Social Security Administration database is riddled with similar errors. A government report found that more than 1,000 people were being "killed" incorrectly every month. In some cases, appealing the decisions can take more than a year to complete.

Because Rivers' error has not reached the Social Security Administration — and her records there appear to be accurate — Foley believes her problem will be relatively easy to fix. The recipe:

"Get a letter from the Social Security Administration verifying you are alive and a letter from local police verifying your driver's license and send it in," he said. "The fix should find its way through the system relatively quickly."

That's assuming Chex Systems declares Rivers alive and kicking some time soon. For now, she remains in the middle of her digital murder mystery. And she may never know who, or what, wanted her dead in the first place.

"I just want my life back," she says. "And I want to be able to write a check."

His dad is rich, and dying. He's facing huge credit card bills and unemployment. His inheritance is just sitting there. And sitting in the desk drawer is a power of attorney document Dad signed for him years ago, giving him the right to do anything he wants with the father's money. The temptation is too powerful, and the crime is too easy, to stop.

The story plays out thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands of times — every year across the country, a scourge of old age.

America's vulnerable, graying population, and the concentration of wealth among older adults, has created a massive opportunity for fraud. Hard statistics are not available, but experts suspect that perhaps half a million elderly adults are ripped off by family members, lawyers and accountants every year, potentially taking $2.6 billion from infirm older Americans. The crime is known as elder financial abuse. Financial expert and consumer advocate John Wasik has called it "the crime of the 21st century."

"This is something that's rarely explored because the victims are rarely in a position to report the abuse," said Wasik, author of 13 books on personal finance issues.

This story will discuss the warning signs of elder theft and offer tips on what to do if you suspect a family member or friend is suffering financial abuse.

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The tool used by the criminals who steal from the elderly is a legal document called a "power of attorney," which enables a designated adult to make financial decisions on behalf of another. Because power of attorney decisions are rarely reviewed, the document has been called a "license to steal." In legal circles, the crime is called "power of attorney abuse."

High-profile cases of elder financial abuse have helped shine a light on this age-old problem. In 2009, Brooke Astor's son and attorney were convicted of stealing $10 million from the socialite's $100 million fortune.

But Astor's estate is dwarfed by that of 104-year-old Huguette Clark, a reclusive heiress worth half a billion dollars who's been the subject of several msnbc.com stories by my colleague Bill Dedman. He's discovered suspicious transactions involving priceless paintings, musical instruments and a New York City apartment, and his reporting has led to a criminal investigation headed by the Manhattan district attorney's office. Thanks to inquiries from more than 100 msnbc.com readers, the New York office of Adult Protective Services is looking into the case. Many writers were prompted by their own personal encounters with elder theft.

That's the first and most important tip, experts say: Get involved. Report the crime. Many criminals get away with siphoning off cash because other relatives have detached from the older adult's life, assuming someone else is doing their job and taking care of end-of-life details.

"Keeping involved, active and in touch with the older person, staying aware of how they are doing and asking a lot of questions, that's very important for prevention and early intervention," said Sharon Merriman-Nai, co-manager of the National Center on Elder Abuse. "It can take next to no time for someone's assets to be depleted, so the quicker you can act, the better."

That means calling your state's Adult Protective Services officer, as msnbc.com readers did in response to Clark's story. You can find a state-by-state list here.

One serious challenge for family members who want to step in and help out: Frequently, local police will interpret elder theft as a civil, rather than a criminal, matter. That's why it's important to report suspicions to the Adult Protective Services office, which knows how to handle such incidents.

Reporting the crime is also critical because financial abuse is often accompanied by other forms of abuse, Merriman-Nai said.

"Physical abuse may be present, too. And if there's financial abuse, there's almost certainly some kind of psychological abuse going on," she said. "Quite often, they are being physically intimidated." In extreme cases, victims won't be able to afford the health care they need because their funds are depleted.

Calling to accuse a relative or a formerly trusted advisor is a big step, however, and one many family members are reluctant to make. It's also possible, Merriman-Nai said, that disputes or rivalries might cause one family member to misinterpret the actions of another. So it's important to ask questions and, if possible, obtain paperwork detailing alleged abuse, such as bank statements.

Wasik said: "You really kind of need to have something in hand to show this stuff is going on. It's not easy to prove without documents."

Garage sales hide theft
But elder financial abuse, particularly when committed by professional financial advisers, can be hard to spot and even harder to prove, said Jerry Walker, a Seattle-based lawyer who specializes in estate planning.

"There's all sorts of ways to liquidate items and have no record of it," Walker said. "I've seen big garage sales, for example, where a lot of property is sold and there are no receipts ... or they form a company and funnel money to the company. They can change beneficiaries or even hire relatives to do easy jobs. There's lots of crazy ways to get money out of an estate."

Elder financial abuse can be brutal and obvious, as in the Astor case. Or it can be much more subtle, Wasik said. In many cases, the issue is greed brought on by a sense of entitlement.

"Some cases are really egregious, such as a wayward son or daughter who comes into the picture and cleans out the accounts. But there are any number of scenarios," he said. "Other times, there are children who know the money is there, and the temptation for some is too great. A lot of people who lost their homes or are going to lose their homes have no financial assets at all. They are technically impoverished, but they see Mom and Dad sitting on a nest egg and they say, 'Hey, they're going to give it to me anyway, so why not use the money now?' "

 Some cases are even more sinister, Merriman-Nai said.

"It's called 'undue influence,' and it's far more sophisticated, a very well-plotted-out, strategy to separate older individuals from their assets," she said. "It begins with someone gaining the trust of an elderly person, then separating them from their support network, isolating them from other people. Then they are able to exert tremendous influence on the elderly person."

That influence can extend all the way to bank teller windows. Elder financial thieves can have such hypnotic power over their victims that they transport the elderly person to the bank and stand nearby while he or she withdraws thousands of dollars in cash — and then hands the money over.

Most cases aren't reported
In fact, a report by MetLife Mature Market published in 2009 found that bank teller training is among the more effective ways to spot and stop elder abuse. In a test, tellers correctly identified suspicious transactions 7 out of 10 times, the report said.

"All by themselves, alert and well-trained bank tellers could have significant impact on financial abuse, especially if their numbers were to grow," the report found. By extrapolating from newspaper accounts of elder abuse, the report's writers estimated that $2.6 billion is stolen from older Americans every year and that only 1 in 14 cases are reported.

There is no national accounting of abuse cases, said Merriman-Nai, and that has blunted efforts to draw attention to the problem. But a paper published by AARP in 2008 (PDF) found that Adult Protective Services agents around the country report an "explosion of financial exploitation cases," particularly those involving power of attorney abuse.

The AARP report concludes that there are three main reasons that power of attorney abuse is so rampant: Receivers of the power, sometimes called the "attorney in fact," have exceeding broad powers. There is a nearly complete lack of monitoring of the attorney in fact. And there are unclear standards for dealing with those who abuse the power.

But perhaps most discouraging is this conclusion from the report:

Power of attorney "abuse may not be detectable until the principal has died."

One bright spot for those concerned about elder abuse: Tucked into the omnibus health care bill Congress passed earlier this year was the Elder Justice Act, which set aside nearly $800 million to expand efforts to investigate elder financial theft during the next four years. Advocates had been attempting to get the funding from Congress in the form of the Elder Justice Act for years.

Still, the fast-growing elderly population has Merriman-Nai concerned about the future.

"The problem is probably going to get worse before it gets better, the way the population is aging," she said. "But one hope we have is that the Baby Boomers are a generation of activists, and they will not go quietly. If we have an opportunity to put this issue on the map, it's now. The resources this generation can bring to resolve these problems can have quite an impact."

IF YOU SUSPECT ABUSE
As financial abuse can take many forms, it can leave many hints. The clearest: If an elderly friend or family member is not getting the medical treatment you think he or she should be able to afford.

Withdrawal or depression are also warning signs, Merriman-Nai said. If the older person is suddenly reluctant to talk about finances, that could also be a sign. But even a gradual withdrawal from normal conversations might be a hint that something is wrong — or that someone is trying to isolate the person from people who might spot the crime.

Unexpected dramatic financial transactions, such as a surprising sale of property or a large cash transaction, should also raise red flags.

HOW TO PREVENT ABUSE
One key to prevention is to stay involved in the elderly person's life well before there is a need to invoke a power of attorney. Maintaining a good relationship — including frank discussions of financial matters — will create a bond of trust that could be all the difference later in life when questions arise about finances.

Also, it's critical to make plans early on, when the elderly person is capable of being fully involved in the decision-making process.

"It's when you aren't taking the bull by the horns that things get out of control," Wasik said.

In many cases, the seeds for abuse are sown when an older person — trying to do the right thing, and preparing for the inevitable — signs what's called a "springing" power of attorney. Such a document takes force only when some trigger is reached, such as confirmation from a doctor that the individual is incapable of making his or her own financial decisions. The power of attorney might not spring into force for five or 10 years. Circumstances, as well as trust levels, can change a lot during that stretch of time.

While it makes sense to give a family member that kind of power over your finances, many older adults trust their accountants or lawyers more than their children. But in either case, Walker recommends not giving too much power to one person.

"You can split power of attorney up among two or three people, so they have to agree on decisions," he said. "That can provide some checks and balances. Of course, they might disagree, and you have to have a method for resolving deadlocks."

Wasik recommends something similar — give one family member the power of attorney, but require that person to provide regular reports to a council of other family members where financial decisions must be justified.

Walker strongly recommends against picking an attorney or accountant to receive the power of attorney.

"They are the ones that know how to play the game and work the rules," he said.

Ultimately, Walker said he wished that attorneys and accountants who exercised power of attorney were responsible to some higher authority, such as a social agency, in order to provide checks and balances.

"If you are an attorney, you are not accountable to anyone," he said. "The only way I can see it working is if you have to prepare an accounting and justify it to someone."

A court-appointed conservatorship is a more expensive option, but it does provide a facility for court review and other safeguards.

Finally, if you suspect elder financial abuse but aren't sure, or you are reluctant to involve law enforcement, Merriman-Nai recommends contacting an elder law attorney. The National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys is one place to look for such a specialist.

Become a Red Tape Chronicles Facebook fan and follow RedTapeChron on Twitter.

I hope you have nothing but good, trustworthy friends. If you don't, they might tell the world you are in some pretty crazy, or even disturbing, places, thanks to Facebook's new "Places" tool.

An angry "friend", for example, can broadcast to everyone (including your boss) that you are in a coffee shop, museum or airport -- even if you are sitting in your cubicle working. Even if you haven't agreed to use Facebook's location service. And even if you aren't logged in to Facebook.

The new Places tool, which is integrated into the standard Facebook mobile application, was released last week with much fanfare and some hand-wringing about its privacy implications. For the most part, however, Places offers users lot of control over when they tell others where they are. Users must actively check-in -- as opposed to being automatically checked in -- as they move around.

But there's an exception: By default, friends can "check you in" whenever they want, and wherever they happen to be. While checked-in friends don't appear in the Places tool without their approval, the check-ins are announced to the world on the friend's wall through status updates. Further, those updates are controlled by your friend's privacy policies, not yours.

In other words, Facebook's tool makes violating your friends' privacy easy.

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"I think it's quite Orwellian. We have literally become each others' Big Brothers," said Alessandro Acquisti, a privacy expert at Carnegie Mellon University.

There is a way to turn this feature off (instructions below). And checked-in friends receive notice that they've been "tagged" as present in a place, and have the opportunity to remove the tag. By then, however, the damage could be done.

Last year, a Web site named "PleaseRobMe.com" created a stir when it poked fun at location-disclosure Web sites like Foursquare.com as creating opportunities for would-be home burglars by making it easy to determine when users were not home. But at least Foursquare users decide for themselves when they will reveal where they are.

Now, if you are my friend, Facebook lets me tell my friends -- and with some tweaks, everyone -- that you are with me, wherever I am.

Facebook has so far responded to this complaint by saying there is no problem. Friends who are checked in don't appear in Places until they consent. And publishing location information in status updates is no big deal, according to the social networking site.

"People have always been able to tell others where they've seen friends," said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt. For example, I can update my status by saying, "Reader Jane Doe is with me at this Seattle coffee shop," even if that were a lie. But that's a false analogy, warns Acquisti.

"People usually don't broadcast to hundreds of friends, as well as strangers, at the same time your current, or presumed, location," he said.

Also, Facebook Places creates a level of validation that a mere status update would not. Users have to be near the place they check in -- location-based services in a mobile device verify that -- so when a Places user tells the world, "I'm at the Bellevue movie theater with LeBron," it's far more believable.

Finally, users who are spooked by a Places status update, but who log in infrequently, won't receive notice for days, or even weeks.

Debate about the friends' check-in issue has been raging at an information ethics blog run by Michael Zimmer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Facebook's Schnitt has even jumped into the conversation there, arguing that new Places tools actually provide users even greater control over personal information than they've had before.

But Zimmer isn't buying it.

"While I understand that users could always mention someone else in status updates, there's a meaningful difference with regard to Places," Zimmer told me. "Facebook has provided an official and automated means of sharing someone's location, where users can now be systematically linked to a specific set of coordinates. These new check-ins could be potentially logged into a database, archived, mined... This is a significant change from just mentioning someone. The concern here is that locational data needs to be treated differently than just an average status update. This is why Facebook has tried to design the system so that, in their terms, no one can be checked in to a location 'without their explicit permission'. Unfortunately, they fell short."

Facebook's business plan
Why would Facebook stubbornly keep this spooky feature in its new tool, and enable it by default, over the wide-eyed objections of privacy advocates?

There are two ways to create a fast-growing new business:

1. Create a new product that's so useful, millions of people rush to use it.

2. Have an existing business that millions of people use, and force them to use your new product.

Here, Facebook has picked technique No. 2. Its Places feature must play catch-up to a host of existing location services like Foursquare. There's no better way to catch up to a first-mover than tying your new feature into your existing product. And one way to make consumers use that product is to compel them to do so. Facebook is counting on its amazing network effects and help from early adopters, who will drag otherwise indifferent users into its location tool, like this: "What? Someone's telling everyone else where I am? I'd better check out this new 'Places,' thing."

My colleague Wilson Rothman offered a compelling argument last week that Facebook is the new Google. People use Facebook to find things more than ever. But if I were Facebook, I'd be worried about the Justice Department seeing Facebook as the new Microsoft, attacking small competitors with its dominant market position, forcing users to adopt a product that subsumes another start-up -- and doing it with an aloof, take-no-prisoners attitude that will someday wrinkle the nose of the wrong U.S. Senator.

Places, like so many Facebook tools, is clever, well-designed, integrated nicely with the rest of the service, and can be fun to use. It's hard to imagine a better way to find friends when you arrive in a city for a convention or family wedding. You can simply ask your mobile phone, "Who's nearby?" or "Who's in my favorite Irish bar down the corner?" Used deftly, it might even help you avoid an awkward meeting with an old girlfriend.

But the way it's been designed for maximum network effect, Places is just as likely to help an old boyfriend's stalking efforts. All it takes is a random friend attempting to check in the former girlfriend.

Consumers have long had a tortured relationship with privacy -- most say it's important to them, but few actually behave that way. That's because it's often hard to predict the future consequences of a privacy-related transaction, Acquisti says.

"Giving someone your privacy is like giving someone a blank check," he says. "You never know what amount might be filled in when it comes back to you."

Dealing with location information should create an extra level of caution, Zimmer says.

"Not to be paranoid, but there are serious concerns about this," he said. "People don't think about (location information) much, but it can reveal quite a bit about you. When you start piecing information together, you can start figuring out what kind of person someone is -- say if they are in a particular church, or they are at a location near a women's health clinic. It might reveal something about you, or assumptions might be made about you that are not really true."

Red Tape Wrestling Tips
While there are several privacy layers available for use with the Places tool, the simplest way to avoid Places headaches is to opt out of automatic placement by friends. It's relatively simple, though I wish it were simpler. Visit Facebook.com, click on account, and then "privacy settings." Then, at the bottom of that page, click on the word "customize settings." Under the category, "Things others share," find "Friends can check me in to Places," and select "Disabled." While you are there, review your other settings and make sure you are comfortable with them.

To fine-tune your Places settings even more, look under "Things I share," and select who can see the places you check in to, and decide if you want others to see you in the "People Here Now" area. But remember, even if you limit the number of people who can see you after you check yourself in, you haven't controlled who can know if you've been checked in by a friend -- that's controlled by your friend's privacy settings, not yours. In this scenario, even if you have opted out of broadcasting your places setting, while you won't appear in the "People Here Now" area, your presence will be disclosed on your Friend's wall post unless you've disabled "Friends can check me in."

Finally, as with all privacy issues, it's often true that information which seems meaningless today might be valuable, and used against you, tomorrow. Divorce lawyers, for example, regularly subpoena supermarket loyalty cards while fighting child custody cases ("Look at all this junk food he buys, your honor!"). It makes sense to limit your use of any tool that helps build a database of location-based information while we all learn what the long-term implications might be.

Google vs. China.  Facebook vs. Pakistan.  YouTube vs. Turkey.  Blackberry vs., well, half the world. If it seems like the Internet is under siege lately, that's because it is.  The cat-and-mouse game between government censors and communications technology is a lot like life along the San Andreas Fault. There are low level rumblings all the time, but every once in a while there's a tectonic shift. 

But why so many tremors and earthquakes lately? And is it a good idea for multinational, for-profit companies to be the standard-bearers for basic human rights like free speech?  Here are some answers.

It's been true since the beginning of organized society: Governments hate secrets. By nature, they cannot allow citizens or enemies to communicate in secrecy. That means every new communications technology is a potential threat. Chat rooms, e-mail, encryption, the Web, Twitter -- all have, one by one, come under assault from haters of secrets.

Now that smart phones have reached the masses, governments around the world are panicky. It's one thing to control citizens' use of e-mail from their bedrooms or cubicles -- in a place like Iran, there are only a few Internet pipes in and out of the country, so it's not hard to shut down the pipes or scan the data flowing through it for offensive or illegal content.  But Blackberry gadgets work differently. They let citizens walk around anywhere with tiny computers that can give users unfiltered access to everything on the Web and enable them to transmit their data with surveillance-busting encryption. If your job is to monitor citizens and keep order, this is an earthquake.

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"We do think that the mobile Internet is where the cat-and-mouse game will play out over the next few years, with the rise of smart phones and ubiquitous 3G connectivity," said Jim Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, a firm that analyses Web traffic. "That's especially true in emerging economies like the (United Arab Emirates), where mobile Internet growth is really exploding -- in many cases mobile Internet providers have leapfrogged fixed-line Internet providers."

Blackberry maker Research in Motion is in the cross-hairs now. On Monday, a ban in Saudi Arabia went into effect, though Blackberry's Messenger service appeared to continue to operate normally. Other bans are threatened in the U.A.E., Algeria, Lebanon, Indonesia and India. But censorship experts expect the battle eventually will affect all mobile Internet devices. That expected escalation alarms Clothilde Le Coz, U.S. director of free speech advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.

"Mobiles devices such as the Blackberry ones are one way to get … news, share news and comment on it. If even these devices are getting controlled and monitored by the governments, it is a bad sign for freedom of speech," Le Coz said.

On Thursday, Blackberry CEO Mike Lazaridis threw down the gauntlet, indicating he plans to pick a fight with Arab nations who try to limit his company's service.

"Everything on the Internet is encrypted," he told the Wall Street Journal. "This is not a BlackBerry-only issue. If they can't deal with the Internet, they should shut it off."

But privately, the company appears to be in active negotiations with governments in the region. Some of the compromises that have been floated would sound alarming to any free speech advocate's ears. A report in The Economic Times in India said Research in Motion offered to let the Indian government access user e-mail and promised to create a system that would allow monitoring of chats within six to eight months.

From an architecture standpoint, there's even more to be concerned about. While hand-held smart phones seem to imply great freedom of movement, they may ultimately be easier to control, Cowie said. Countries tend to have far fewer mobile providers than Internet service providers, as the wireless spectrum is highly regulated. That gives governments a lot of leverage in any censorship debate.

"This might make it a lot easier for governments to censor -- or to implement community-appropriate filtering -- depending on your spin," Cowie said. "There are typically fewer mobile providers in a given national Internet market because of licensing requirements. They have more tightly integrated control over the end user Internet experience."

Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain, who runs the censorship-fighting Web site Herdict.org, takes that argument one step farther. Now that Web users seem to be clustering around a few Web sites and service providers, censors' jobs are getting easier, he thinks. It's hard for governments to censor e-mails flowing in an out of from hundreds of Web mail services. It's much easier to censor all traffic in and out of Facebook.com.

"(It) could be a game changer, the re-emergence of more centralized umbrellas for activities on the Internet," he said.

Cell users are rebels
On the other hand, Cowie thinks mobile Internet users have already shown a disdain for control that will ultimately be the undoing of any attempts at censorship. Smart phone users, for example, have demonstrated their tendency toward rebellion.

"There was a time when mobile providers thought that they could create a 'walled garden' mobile Internet," he said. "They believed that users would be satisfied with a few kinds of well-tended content on their phones, served up from the provider's own online kiosks.  If the story had ended there, it would have been a government censor's dream -- complete integration of hardware, software, delivery infrastructure and content, in one manageable package.

'We're all geeks now'
 "However, mobile consumers have pretty clearly indicated that they reject that model. They want access to the entire Internet on their smart phone -- not just a small corner of it, but all their familiar sites and services. They want to be able to jailbreak their smart phones, have carrier choice … and generally have the same freedom to tinker that they have on their desktop. This was a somewhat unexpected outcome, but the masses have spoken. We're all geeks now." 

If Middle Eastern nations stick to their Blackberry bans, their motivations will remain hazy. Few observers take the claim of national security at face value, and it's possible the ban is aimed as much at halting teen-aged flirting as it is to preventing terrorism attacks. (Thanks, World Blog.)

What the United Arab Emirates has asked for isn't, on its face, much different from what the U.S. government regularly asks for, said Mark Rasch, former head of the U.S. Department of Justice computer crime unit. 

During the Clinton years, the federal government engaged in a protracted (and failed) battle to prevent the widespread use of encryption by Internet users. But federal investigators armed with court orders still use wiretaps and other technologies to regularly inspect e-mail, Web and mobile communications. And European nations have saddled Internet service providers with data retention requirements for the purpose of law enforcement investigations.

There is an important distinction, however, said Rasch, now a consultant with Secure IT Experts.

"What the UAE is asking for is not fundamentally different from what the U.S. government sometimes asks for," he said. "But while it may not be an unreasonable request, it may be an unreasonable government that is requesting it."

There are plenty of reasons not to trust foreign nations with the keys to inspect smart phone traffic. However flawed U.S. due process might be, most U.S. citizens would be considerably more uncomfortable with the idea that governments in the United Arab Emirates or India could read their Blackberry messages in real time, or months after they were sent.

Tala Dowlatshah, another spokeswoman for Reporters Without Borders, said it's important for consumers to realize that countries like the UAE are trying to have it both ways.

"In recent years, the UAE has implemented a  Draconian  policy toward its citizens concerning the free flow of information," she said. "Clearly the UAE believes in democracy and free markets when it comes to doing big business deals with the West. But when it comes to empowering its own citizens, that's when the country demonstrates how small minded it really is."

Google's lesson
But while human rights groups can call attention to the problem, at the moment, the job of fighting on the front lines of the censorship battle has really been left to companies like Google. The firm's well-publicized spat with China earlier this year set the standard for company vs. state censorship battles. Google had happily provided China with a scaled-down Web experience designed to prevent citizens from finding Web sites on controversial topics such as the Falun Gung or the Dalai Lama. But when a scandal erupted that suggested hackers sponsored by the Chinese government had raided Google's servers, the company flipped a switch and began sending Chinese users to its unfiltered Hong Kong site. China, in turn, threatened to kick Google out, a potential body blow to the company's Asian aspirations.

In the end, Google blinked, but only slightly. It went back to the filtered Chinese site, but added a link to the free Hong Kong site. That earthquake was over, even if the fault line along the China-Google border remains active.

Zittrain, who praised Google for confronting China, encourages tech companies to think about the big picture -- instead of next quarter's profits -- during censorship fights.

"It's helpful for corporations to realize they are representing interests and issues that go beyond their customers," he said. Standing up to censorship is the thing to do, he stressed, but it's also good business.

"In a place like China, if there is a regime change in 15 or 20 years, how might you be greeted if you stood up on principles? Or if you didn't?"

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It's a nightmare scenario: One day, you log on to the Web, and only 20 or 25 Web sites built by brand-name Net companies fire up quickly. Everything else -- all the mom-and-pop sites, all the niche retailers, all the alternative blogs you read -- dribble out onto your screen like it's 1996 all over again.

But this is a nightmare, too: You log on to the Web after work, and nothing seems to be working. That's because the people living in the three other apartments in your building are busy downloading one pirated Blu-ray movie while watching another. Or spammers have taken control of your neighbors' machines and are pumping out millions of e-mails, totally clogging your Internet pipe. You call your ISP and complain. An operator there says, "Sorry, those pirates and spammers have just as much right to the network as you do."

The important debate on net neutrality is perhaps the most misunderstood technology argument of our time. Sure, neutrality is good and discrimination is bad. And of course, it's terrible that companies like Google and Verizon seem to be holding secret meetings that will decide the future of our beloved free Internet. It's a shame that this important debate has been dragged down by sloganeering and extremism.

Here are two important points everyone should understand about this fight:

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1. This is not the fight of big companies vs. little people that it has been cast to be. It is big companies vs. other big companies. It's Web content suppliers like Skype and YouTube vs. Web bandwidth suppliers like Comcast and Verizon. You, dear reader, are a pawn.

2. "Net neutrality," as described by its extreme supporters, does not exist today, and that's a good thing. Internet service providers "de-prioritize" certain kinds of traffic already, such as spam or denial of service attacks. And in an even more subtle way, network neutrality cannot exist in the Internet's current architecture. By its nature, the system itself is kinder to some kinds of communication over others. The TCP protocol used to move packet traffic around the Web favors latency-tolerant applications, such as e-mail, over real-time communications, like video chat. That's just the way the technology works.

For regular readers of this column, you know I love a good chance to express outrage at companies like Verizon. There is a lot going on here that smells bad. No one should trust Google and Verizon -- or the other members of the telecom-and-Internet cabal that's been holding secret meetings with the FCC -- to settle this issue in a way that benefits consumers. They will not. This is the real shame of the net neutrality debate. Neither the agency nor those companies have any good will with the American public that would create a trusting enough environment that might enable a sensible debate. I fear this works to the advantage of companies looking to exploit consumers even more for profit.

Back when the general concept of equal access was first applied to the Internet, consumers were happy to push around e-mails and short instant messages to each other. The idea that you might be able to watch full-motion video of a baseball game on a cell phone while driving in a moving car had not yet been imagined. Consumers who watch such video for hours per day have so far expressed outrage any time a bandwidth supplier has tried to cap that usage. That's silly. Is it fair that someone who reads 50 e-mails per day on their phone and nothing more would pay the same as someone who streams a gigabyte's worth of video? Is it fair that your phone might not work for phone calls because 12 other people nearby are watching "Lost"?

On the table is the notion that bandwidth hogs like Google's YouTube might be asked to pay a larger share of costs, at least when delivering content over newer networks like wireless broadband. If YouTube or Major League Baseball paid extra, it would be able to guarantee non-jittery viewing to its cell phone users. On its face, that doesn't sound like such a non-starter, but it does violate the notion of net neutrality.

I get the slippery slope argument. I get fears that allowing such charges could lead us down the road to a two-tiered Internet, with first-class service for a tiny few and coach class for the rest. I understand even more the corporations involved here, if they win the right to charge in tiers, will overpromise and under-deliver. Instead of investing in new, better service, they will just take the money and downgrade most service. And then there's the biggest fear of all: that cable companies will turn the Web into, well, cable. It is possible that Internet-delivered television running over a first-class Internet pipe could lead to marginalization of the rest of the Web.

That's why I'm afraid we are all taking up the wrong fight. The fight should involve the real problem, rather than the buzzwords. It should involve guaranteed minimum service levels, and a real government resource for complaints. (The FCC is awful at directly helping consumers -- just read this column.) It should quickly investigate and fine misbehavior by ISPs, such as throttling service or misleading consumers about available bandwidth. It should protect small-time Internet users while allowing early adopters and early innovators the choice to spend more and get more. Is a proclamation of absolute net neutrality the best road to a fair Internet? I doubt it.

I understand that the cast of characters lining up on the side against net neutrality have a terrible reputation. Groups like "Hands off the Internet" are simply regurgitating buzzwords about less government regulation and more free speech. It's the same crowd that wants to privatize all American highways with the idea that this would remove potholes, when we all know it would just mean higher tolls. I'm not on their side.

More important, if companies like Google and Verizon are allowed to have a lovely private dinner and set telecommunications policy for the rest of the country, we might all be better off moving to Canada.

But some of the net neutrality proposals floated so far would actually make it harder for Internet service providers to filter out Internet traffic that degrades service, such as hacker attacks. And virtually all of them would make a winner out of bandwidth hogs.

I'm not sure how hard consumers should fight to prevent AT&T from charging YouTube more if its users are clogging up Internet pipes. Instead, we should be fighting to make sure AT&T and other ISPs don't give us less, and that requires a more subtle touch than the religious war that's unfolding right now. Network neutrality is much less desirable than enforceable regulation which states that common efficiency practices like "network shaping" are deployed only in the best interest of consumers.

But that would require an FCC that does more than simply act as messenger between the titans of technology as they divide up the big pile of money sitting on the table. Right now, I'm afraid that the battle over buzzwords is distracting us from the real problem, and giving companies an even easier time taking advantage of consumers.

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Jim Noble took Bank of America to small claims court.
 

If you've ever felt powerless in a fight against a large corporation or been blind-sided by bank fees, you should know about James Noble.