Friday, April 13, 2001

Fear of Online Crime

Americans are deeply worried about criminal activity on the Internet. 87% of Americans say they are concerned about credit card theft online; 82% are concerned about how organized terrorists can wreak havoc with Internet tools; 80% fear that the Internet can be used to commit wide scale fraud; 78% fear hackers getting access to government computer networks; 76% fear hackers getting access to business networks; and 70% are anxious about criminals or pranksters sending out computer viruses that alter or wipe out personal computer files.

These concerns may be a factor in the public’s support of the right of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to intercept criminal suspects’ email. Some 54% of Americans approve of the idea of FBI monitoring of suspects’ email, while 34% disapprove. There is equal public support of the FBI monitoring of email, phone calls, and postal mail.

The overall public anxiety about online crime occurs at the same time that Americans express growing distrust of the government. Only 31% of Americans say they trust the government to do the right thing most of the time or all of the time. That figure is down from 41% in 1988.

So, it is perhaps not very surprising that while Americans express a willingness to let law enforcement agencies intercept suspects’ email, they also support the general idea that new laws should be written to cover how law enforcement agencies monitor email. Just 14% of Americans say the laws that relate to intercepting telephone calls are good enough to cover Internet communications. Fully 62% of Americans say new laws should be written to make sure that ordinary citizens’ privacy is protected from government agencies.

Among the relatively small number of Americans who have heard about the FBI’s email sniffing program called “Carnivore” or “DCS1000,” there is much more evenly divided opinion. Forty-five percent of people who have heard of it say Carnivore is good because it will allow the FBI a new way of tracking down criminals. Another 45% say Carnivore is bad because it could be used to read emails to and from ordinary citizens.

"Americans are searching for an Information Age answer to the age-old question of how to balance their yearning to be protected from criminals and their yearning to prevent government authorities from abusing their investigative powers," says Susannah Fox, co-author of the report. "Fear of online crime compels many Americans to accept wiretaps as a necessary tool, but they instinctively want to make sure that there are safeguards that prevent unwarranted government snooping."

The Pew Internet results cited here are based on a survey of 2,096 American adults that was conducted between February 1 and March 1. Some 1,198 of the respondents are Internet users.

Performance Issues: March Madness Sports Sites
The performance of sports sites covering the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament paralleled the results of the tournament itself – some teams won, and some lost, according to Keynote Systems, an Internet performance authority. Keynote measured the performance and availability of the major sports sites covering the tournament, as well as streaming content and multi-page transactions for selecting game results during the tournament on select sites. March Madness has arguably become known as the biggest sports event on the Web, due primarily to people at work logging on to follow teams' results for their office pools.

Web page access was slow on NCAABasketball.net; transactions in which winners and losers were selected were slowest on CBS.Sportsline.com; and availability of low and high bandwidth streams measured on SportsIllustrated.CNN.com delivered low availability, with low bandwidth users experiencing poor quality.

The NCAABasketball.net site experienced consistently slow performance, averaging 7.50 seconds from March 11 to April 2, slowing to as much as 10.27 seconds on March 15. ESPN.com's NCAA basketball page averaged 88.7% availability for the time period, affected by slow performance during the first week. The site's performance improved on Friday, March 16, with availability exceeding 99.0% through the rest of the tournament. Yahoo!'s NCAA basketball page delivered high performance, averaging 1.26 seconds to access, with 99.4% availability; as did Sportsline.com's NCAA basketball page, averaging 1.28 seconds, with 99.1% availability.

Streaming performance and quality for the low bandwidth 80K video measured on SportsIllustrated.CNN.com ranked 0.24 on the Keynote Scale for Streaming, with 30.1% availability, and a rendering score that indicates the quality delivered was only 9% of what was intended; the high bandwidth 300K stream ranked 2.53 on the Scale, with 14.5% availability, and a rendering score of 49%. Availability was compromised by high error rates.

CBS.Sportsline.com's high bandwidth 300K stream demonstrated very high quality, with an average 4.68 quality score, exceeding the average for video streams on the Keynote Streaming 20 Index, which has averaged between 2.52 and 3.26 each week since January 14. This stream's availability was 86.6%, with a rendering score of 96%.

"The view for users experiencing a low quality video includes frozen frames, slow motion, shadow images, jitters, rebuffering slowdowns, unsynced audio and video, and lost audio," said Matt Parks, director of product management for Keynote. "The results of our March Madness streaming measurements illustrate the range of video quality streamed over the Web today."

Keynote took its streaming measurements covering the Final Four games the last weekend of the tournament, and on Monday, April 2 when the final game was played.