It can not be denied, that any communication being transmitted across any medium, be it the Internet, satellite, etc., needs to "scanned" for its contents and brought into the appropriate form for transmission (e.g. conversion in electromagnetic waves, voltage on/off signals, ...)

Further on, there is no doubt, that machines need to not only translate the content, but also need to scan them and take decisions based on them (virus filtering has been pointed out already, spamfilters is another, without scanning data even e-mail routing would be entirely impossible, firewalls, and so on, and so on).

The problem is not the scanning itsself, as I see it, but whether or not the information possibly available from such scanning is being used for other purposes, that could mean material or immaterial damage (in the widest sense of the word, like reduction of reputation, not receiving wanted communication etc.) to the persons originating or receiving such traffic. Knowing human nature, one can for example take for granted, that forwarding information about communication to humans already establishes damage, especially if the information can be linked to humans. We can also take for granted, that computers don't create any such damage, if they don't collect information derived from such scans (except perhaps some counters for statistical and optimizing purposes - like routers on the Internet, like any modem, like any wireless access point, any network card etc.) - and we do know, the whole communication as we know it today would not be possible, if we don't accept those machines to scan, translate and decide upon our data.



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