Cyberspace is often thought of as realm of freedom, even of fun. At least until recently, few would have associated surveillance with cyberspace. The 'cyber' prefix has been attached to fiction ("cyberpunk"), and to fashion, as well as to entertainment, education, finance, architecture, and city planning. Cyberjaya, within the Malaysian multimedia Super Corridor, is one of the world's first cities to include "cyber" in its name. This in itself is paradoxical, because at first cyberspace was popularly associated with the immaterial, the virtual, the displaced, and the disembodied. In William Gibson's novel, Neuromancer, cyberspace seems to be apart from the corporeal, institutional world. But in Cyberjaya, the integration of the built environment and the global economy with 'cyberspace' is taken for granted. The fibre-optic broadband links that provide the infrastructure for cyberspace are tied to government plans and a changing economy, but not necessarily to surveillance. 
In Asian countries, no less than in others outside Asia, cyberspace is a realm of surveillance. Personal data is gathered, sorted, stored, traded and processed for the purpose of management, influence, and social control. Most innocent, seemingly, would be the efforts of e-commerce online marketers to use customer profiles to create consumer clusters in order to target specific persons and groups for advertising and solicitation. Most sharpy, perhaps, would be the use of Internet data tracking techniques to discover the whereabouts and plans of Al Qaeda members since the devastating "terrorist" attacks of September 11, 2001. In March, 2002, for instance, American Internet intelligence experts detected Al Qaeda email-use patterns is Malaysia as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan. At either end of this spectrum, I shall argue, that some critical  question are raised about the "hidden face" of the Internet, Although it is acknowledged that civil society  may use the Internet, in reality it is used in Asian countries as elsewhere for repressive and illiberal surveillance purposes. 
Whatever freedom and fun may be generated in cyberspace, the reality is that the Internet does not create a "space apart", a realm of technologically enabled liberty. Rather, as the Internet is increasingly integrated with everyday life, it provides some new ways of engaging in old practices. It may well be that our relationship to our bodies alters, subtly, as we are able to do more things at a distance. Organizational behaviours and expectations may also develop in new ways as the Internet and its associated intranets become embedded in bureaucratic routines. It may well be that we can discern changes in the very notions of time and space that structure human social activity. But none of this means that fundamental changes in social relationships, and especially in the political economy of power, are occurring. It is easy to forget that even in Gibson's novel, however much utopian cyberpunks may have been.
While not wishing to promote dystopian perspectives on the Internet, it would be irresponsible to ignore what might be thought of as a dark side, a hidden face of cyberspace. This has to do with how we conceive of cyberspace. For a brief period in the 1990s, it seemed to some that cyberspace had only a bright side.Sociologically, however, it is appropriate to use the term "cyberspace" to connote the covergence of what were once thought of as different spheres: information technologies and telecommunications. The computing machinery provides the media with flows of information. Cyberspace, then, refers to the social and cultural relations involved in computer-mediated communication. Even if we avoid referring to cyberspace and use the more precise-sounding term "Internet" there is no escaping the social shaping and thus mixed influences on its development. 
The Internet is by definition a techno-social, evolving medium. It is in many ways a process rather than a "thing."Janet Abbate says, "The turbulent history of the Internet may be a reminder of the very real material consideration that lie behind this technology and of their political and economic consequences." Abbate has in mind in particular the American military concerns built into the Internet at its origin, but also networking philosophies in other countries, and end users everywhere, which help to shape the Internet as a medium of communication, using electroic mail and the World Wide Web. Like other technological innovations the Internet represents human social activity, and as such manifests all the ambiguities and contradictions that are common to such activity. 
The particular "material considerations" discussed here are ones that relate to the coordination and control capacities of the Internet. Just as it is a mistake to focus on the supposedly virtual aspects of the Internet, as if these were separate from bodily life in geographical places, so it is wrong to think of cyberspace as a new domain of human activity. Rather, the Internet is superimposed upon and integrated with already existing forms of communication. In a world where nation states have simultaneously been trying to shore up their cultural and social defences while ceding much power of regulation to the marketplace, new media of communication such as the Internet have become increasingly significant. The capacities of cyberspace for information processing have a huge impact both on how nation states govern their populations and how corporations marshal the behaviour of consumers. These are the processes that I refer to as "surveillance."Surveillance is personal data processing for particular purposes. Put another way, surveillance is focused attention on behaviours and trends of persons and of populations with a view to manage, control, protect, or influence them. Coordination and control are thus built into this understanding of surveillance. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, computers became the vital medium of surveillance, allowing collected data to be stored, matched, retrieved, processed, marketed, and circulated. Above all searchable databases became the key to surveillance practices, permitting new levels of classifying, categorizing and cataloguing of personal data. This is generated by systems of the kind that permit citizens to gain online access to government departments or that seek niche' markets in specific neighbourhoods of people with similar socio-economic characteristics. Similarly, these systems have an impact on organizational practices of human resource management and of policing. It is worth stressing that activities such as these may be construed positively. They permit greater efficiency and speed, and may well result in increased benefit for citizens and consumers, who experience them as enhancing their comfort, convenience, and safety. 
Without suggesting that surveillance is intrinsically sinister, however, it must be admitted that all forms of human categorizing and classifying carry risks. During the same quarter century as computers became established in administration, questions were raised, protests mounted, and regulation emerged, mainly in an effort to protect personal data and to try to safeguard privacy. Laudable results of this include the development of Fair Information Practices, the European Data Protection Directive, and the OECD Guidelines for handling personal data. Several Asian countries, including Java and Korea, base their management of computer-based personal information held by government departments on the OECD Guidelines, while others such as Malaysia and Hong Kong refer positively to those Guidelines.
But by the 1990s, the emergence of the Internet as medium for commercial, management, policing, and government activities military intelligence and war-making spelled the birth of cyberspace.  

Q.1. According to Janet Abbate, what is not an instance of the "turbulent history"of the Internet?