ABSTRACT
American hyper-power world dominance by public and private agencies has replaced British Empire hyper-power world domination in the period 1815-1914. Edward Snowden’s revelations of United States and United Kingdom surveillance have given rise to several important papers examining the geographical and territorial limits of the internet, comparing it to the imperial telegraph and even to the Roman imperial road. This paper recalls earlier telegraphy research and explains how the previous hyperpower, the British Empire, was able to control communications in order to extend its extraterritorial application of domestic law. I explain that the nineteenth century telegraph ‘cables that girdled the Earth’ were sunk into the sea in Cornwall, southwest England, and that today’s internet fibre cables are in the same places – with the result that the greatest National Security Agency espionage-gathering operation is a joint US/ UK operation from the small town of Bude, Cornwall. Add to that historical espionage the invention of encryption/decryption computing, devices from Babbage’s Difference Engine to Turing and Tommy Flower’s Colossus Marks I and II that broke both Enigma and Lorenz in World War II. The recipe now exists for what the National Security Agency calls ‘Total Information Awareness’ and the Orwellian nightmare of totally efficient surveillance and ‘war is peace’ according to the Ministry of Truth. But it existed before, and we should learn from the past.
