This chapter explores the philosophical theories that attempt to provide guidance when determining the best way to balance
the rights of the individual user of Information and Computer Technologies (ICTs) with the legitimate public concerns of the
societies impacted by these technologies.
Imagine being sentenced to ten years in prison due to the contents of an email message your government disapproved of. This
frightening possibility became reality for Shi Tao. In 2005, he composed an email from his office in China using a Yahoo account,
which he then sent to a pro-democracy website in New York City. He attached to the email an article, which he wished to publish
anonymously, on China's new policies regarding crackdowns on potential pro-democracy dissidents in China (MacKinnon
2008). When Chinese authorities became aware of the article they considered it a breach of state secrets and sought to find out
the author. They eventually received crucial information about Shi Tao's identity from Yahoo's Asian business partners in
Hong Kong (MacKinnon
2008). This evidence was then used to convict him in a Chinese court.
There are two ethical issues here: whether the Chinese government's actions in suppressing Shi Tao's free speech rights were
ethically wrong; and how the ICTs used contributed to that situation. Regarding the first issue, many people outside of the
Chinese government argue that there was a moral wrong perpetrated in this case, even if it did proceed from Chinese laws and
regulations. Later, we will look at some of the philosophical theories that motivate this response. The second issue is more
difficult.
Did Shi Tao have a reasonable right to expect his email provider to keep his identity confidential? Did Yahoo's representatives
in Hong Kong grievously breach the privacy rights of Shi Tao when they complied with the request of the Chinese government
for help in investigating this case? Yahoo maintains that they broke no law in this matter, nor do they admit legal wrongdoings
in the three other similar cases in China they are involved in. Still, it is clear that the leadership at Yahoo must have
felt some genuine moral concern for this situation as Jerry Yang, one of the co-founders of Yahoo and its current
CEO, made a solemn public apology to Shi Tao's mother in front of the United States Congress and, in addition, the company
set up the
‘Yahoo! Human Rights Fund’, which provides financial aid to those impacted by human rights abuses in Asia (MacKinnon
2008).
This case highlights the global challenges that revolve around human rights and ICTs. Why were journalists, human rights advocates,
and the United States Congress so morally outraged by the actions of Yahoo Inc. and its business partners? Why did the Chinese
government consider it had the right to know the identity of the author? Why did Shi Tao trust the ICTs he was using would
protect his identity? You may not be involved in anything as politically charged as Shi Tao, but even so, do you have a right
to expect that your web and mobile communications will remain private? These are some of the questions we are going to explore
in the rest of this chapter.
Everything we do leaves a trail of information,
a
digital footprint as it were. This information can be looked at in many different ways. Imagine filling in a detailed log with entries for
every single action you do: awoke to alarm clock at 7.00 a.m., tossed the covers aside at 7.05, placed feet in slippers at
7.05 and 30 seconds, etc. The more detailed this log becomes the more someone reading it would know about you. Perhaps one
might keep tabs on your exact location as you moved around doing your daily chores. Maybe one could keep an accurate diary
of all one's personal communications and social interactions. The more and more layers of information like this one could
gather, the deeper one can come to understand you, who you are, what you do, who you know, where you go, what you believe.
Certainly, nothing short of some divine being would be able to achieve this kind of detailed information with the required
amount of accuracy. In fact, God or a Recording Angel does just this in the Abrahamic religions, noting down every act and
thought one does or has during one's life to be fully recounted on Judgement Day. But, as more and more of us use ICTs, we
leave many disparate trails of digital information. Cell phone call logs, GPS tracking data in our cars and mobile phones,
friend lists on social networking sites, receipts for goods bought off- and online, voluminous emails and text messages: until
recently all this information had existed in separate and incompatible formats and databases. Anyone wanting to follow our
trail of information would have had a challenging task at hand. This is rapidly changing though as the separate providers
of these services have come to realize the synergy that can be achieved by collecting as much of this data as possible and
sharing it widely, creating a digital footprint that is much easier to track. Digital advertising can follow this trail and
deduce the interests of each individual and market goods and services tailored to each
person. While this may result in better shopping, will it also protect us from unwanted intrusion into our lives? How will
we determine who gets to collect, share and profit from all of this personal information?
Who is going to ensure the accuracy of all this information and the proper interpretation of the collected data? Certain customer
profiles will result in obtaining unbeatable opportunities and savings, others will not be as lucky, and all will be based
on a digital footprint constructed from income projections, credit ratings, health prospects and demographics. Life will be
wonderful for the digital elite that maximally fit the profiles of a good consumer, but someone with the wrong friend list,
search engine queries, web searches, racial profile and travel patterns could be deemed a bad credit risk or, even worse,
a potential terrorist.
A deeper concern for our rights as citizens in the world of information is found in the work of Luciano Floridi, who argues
that information has an ontological force in the construction of our personal identity, meaning that, at the deepest level,
information affects who we are and what we can become (see Floridi
2006a,
2006c,
2007b,
2008d). Since it plays such a central role in our identity, Floridi argues that we must be afforded certain rights to protect ourselves.
To see how this all works, imagine receiving an unexpected letter that details how you are the heir of a fortune you did not
previously know about. That would change your life, and if the letter were lost, blocked or misdirected, that too would change
your life. That letter, a piece of information, is a vital component of your future potential identities. Likewise, all the
various bits of information that constitute your digital footprint taken together help determine who you are and your place
in the social world. This means that we must pay close attention to the forces that access and manipulate that information.
The wrong information in the wrong hands can critically alter your ability to operate in the social world. Because information
so deeply constitutes our identity we even call such an offence
identity theft. Acts of inappropriate use, disclosure, or manipulation of our personal information can rightly be seen as acts of aggression
against our very personality (Floridi
2006c,
2007b). In addition to fostering the protection of each individual's information self, we must also foster the ability of each
person to steward his or her own information and to freely express their personality, in order to encourage their growth,
flourishing and self-actualization. This makes it a primary concern of governments to set policies that respect information
rights
.
This is an unparalleled moment in human history. ICTs have been steadily making it easier for people to communicate and share
all kinds of data across
nearly every political border at increasingly lower cost. While some welcome this as the fruition of the promises of liberty,
democracy and technological progress, others see it as a corrosive influence, which will finish off the last vestiges of indigenous
world culture, or threaten the power of regimes that require their citizens’ acquiescence to the limited possibilities available
in their own countries.
How can members of small, indigenous populations resist the wonders of ICTs and their lure into the high-tech world of plentiful
information and opportunities? Indeed, even in the case of larger and more entrenched cultures, how can we avoid a progressive
blending and homogenization? How can a country silence dissidents emboldened by allies and contacts in the wider world? Less
dramatically, but important nonetheless, who is to set the standards of civility in net discourse? Every culture has differing
norms regarding propriety and decorum in personal communication. Thus, an informal email typical of citizens in Europe or
the United States might greatly insult those in a more formal, traditional culture. Images considered a trifling joke in one
culture might be considered foul pornography or blasphemy in another and even inflame them into bloody riots.
We might want to adopt a common protocol for the content of communications on the net. If so, should it be a permissive set of standards or a strict and formal
one? If we allow for a high level of free speech, we stand to alienate our fellow world citizens who do not share our conviction
that free speech is a public good. If, instead, we censor or limit interactions between users in a way that would make more
authoritarian governments and traditional cultures happy, then we stand to lose the freedoms we enjoy on the net right now.
We will now look at the philosophical justifications for free speech and privacy, as these play out in the use of ICTs where
anonymous speech can exacerbate the conflicts regarding pornography, hate speech, privacy and political dissent.
Citizens of liberal democracies take for granted wide-ranging freedoms of expression and speech. In the liberal tradition,
it is considered wrong to limit expression unless doing so would prevent harm or extreme offence to other members of the society.
Even though the last sentence sounds simple, it turns out to have complex implications making it difficult to draft effective
international political policy that respects this right. Even countries whose citizens hold closely allied philosophies regarding
free speech and privacy, such as the US and the European Union, differ on issues in the control of pornography or hate speech
and whether or not cryptography is a protected form of speech (see Spinello
2003, p. 53).
The notion that we have a right to freedom of speech is a modern one and many traditional societies do not always favour granting
this right. Certain ICTs such as the Web bring these two traditions into conflict. In this section we will look at the strongest
philosophical justifications for free speech and then turn to the specific problems arising as these values are expressed
through global ICTs.
7.4.1 Free speech is a social good
The birth of Western philosophy occurred in a special historical period, during which moments of relatively unrestricted speech
occurred in places such as ancient Athens. These moments were short-lived, and many of the early philosophers, such as
Socrates (469–399 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) found death and exile respectively as their reward for questioning traditional
belief systems.
Plato (429–347 BC), the student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, took an opposing view and famously argued in his
Republic for a state that strictly controls the tenor and content of art, poetry and music (Hamilton and Cairns
1989, p. 575). So, from its very beginning as a subject of inquiry, freedom of speech can find both enemies and allies in philosophy.
However, it is not until the modern period that we find its strongest ally in the form of the English philosopher John Stuart
Mill (1806–1873).
In
On Liberty, Mill argues for broad social freedoms for the individual in both the private and public domain, and that a society, in order
to be truly free, must allow for each individual to enjoy an internal ‘liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of
opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological’ (Mill
2007,
Chapter 1). Thus, each individual is the master of his or her own thoughts and feelings. Mill expressly includes the right to express
and publish one's thoughts and opinions. He argues that the free state must grant the ‘liberty of tastes and pursuits; of
framing the plan of life to suit one's character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without
impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct
foolish, perverse, or wrong’ (Mill
2007). He also claims that a free state must allow its adult citizens to gather and congregate in any way they see fit, again
as long as no harm comes from it (Mill
2007). So, in a free state, people should be allowed to formulate and express their own thoughts and ideas in any way they see
fit and to whomever they want in whatever style they like, as long as no harm comes from this activity.
Clearly, Mill sees this as the greatest way for the individuals in a society to pursue their best interests and flourish as
persons. If the state is composed of strong individuals, who are engaged in myriad activities all pursuing their
various interests, the society as a whole will benefit from the best of that activity so its members will all be collectively
better off. So, even if someone's choice of topic is an unorthodox one, it is critical that we do not censor it, even if it
makes many people uncomfortable, as these ideas just may prove fruitful to the whole, either by strengthening the orthodox
view in light of the new challenge, or in overturning false or outdated ideas that may have the society in thrall. In fact,
this is just how all civil rights gains have been made in the last few centuries.
The key to all of this is that Mill insists that this activity must be tolerated as long as no harm is done. This has come
to be called the ‘harm principle’ and I will refer to it as such for the rest of this chapter. The harm principle sounds very reasonable and
most people find it unobjectionable upon first hearing. Still, it is fair to wonder what may count as harm. Do we only run
afoul of this requirement when we cause physical harm or could mental anguish count? If mental anguish counts, then some difficulties
arise with this theory. Mill seems to want to protect the rights of iconoclasts who challenge deeply held beliefs in a society.
But the very actions of a socially radical free thinker will certainly offend the established members of any society, and
offence is a painful experience, potentially harmful, so the iconoclast may appear to be violating the harm principle.
Mill can avoid this criticism by limiting the notion of harm to include only those states that cause physical, monetary or
extreme emotional damage. So, if growth and change can be a painful yet healthy and desirable experience, agonizing challenges
coming from some members of a society may actually represent opportunities to develop and adapt and therefore must be tolerated
or opposed openly in the realm of public debate. As a result, offence is not an instance of harm, in fact it is just the opposite,
it is an opportunity to strengthen and grow. This means that, in a free state, the speech of individuals must be protected
from government censors and the ridicule and scorn of established social orders, even if their words are offensive.
7.4.2 Unlimited free speech does not exist
The other side of this debate is best represented by a contemporary philosopher, Stanley Fish, who argues that no society
can allow completely unfettered speech and expect to last for long (Fish
1994). Fish claims that every individual expresses herself within a particular society and that society is composed of a set of
more or less shared values, or at least a range of values. This means that each individual is a product of the influences
and ideas percolating through her society. So, to claim that her speech is completely free is too strong, since there are
always constraints on speech. In order to participate in a society, one must accept certain limits to one's freedom of speech.
In his book
Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein explains a similar concept, which he calls a
‘language-game’ (Wittgenstein
1953). Seeing language as a
game in this instance is a useful metaphor to explain the communication of information: the interlocutors are the players and
there are many rules of the game that must be followed or no communication occurs. So unfettered free speech would be a game
with no rules. But since a game with no rules can hardly be called a game, unfettered free speech could hardly be called communication.
It would just be pure babble. This leads to the conclusion that there is no unfettered free speech and to the further evaluative
claim that it is a good thing that we do not have totally free speech, since we want to communicate and operate within a society
and neither is possible if speech is completely unregulated. This means that we have to accept appropriate limits on our freedom
of speech to communicate and keep our society working (see Fish
1994).
We are now faced by a dilemma. On the one hand, Mill claims that our free society will be jeopardized if we regulate the speech
of minority opinion in any way. On the other, we have a strong argument from Fish that suggests that, no matter what, our
speech must be regulated in order for it to serve its function as a kind of social glue that holds a society together. If
there is no way around this dilemma, we are stuck either with stagnating societies incapable of innovation or ones that are
too permissive and chaotic to survive.
7.4.3 Securing the electronic frontier
We can see both horns of the free speech dilemma playing out in the debate over how (or even whether) to regulate communications
over the Internet and other ICTs. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group founded in 1990 by civil libertarians
John Gilmore, Mitch Kapor and John-Perry Barlow, was created to serve as the first public advocacy group that ‘championed
the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights’ (EFF website). As ICTs have moved to the fore as the
primary mode for public discourse, EFF has been involved in every major legal battle in the United States regarding the rights
of ICTs users. EFF's motivations for getting involved are no doubt as diverse as the group's membership but the website warns
that, ‘[I]f laws can censor you, limit access to certain information, or restrict use of communication tools, then the internet's
incredible potential will go unrealized’ (EFF website). Here we see an argument clearly derived from ideas similar to Mill's.
The Internet has a potential that is of value to mankind, but that value will be lost if restrictions are placed on its users.
In order to protect this social good we must protect strong individual rights such as free speech and the right to disseminate
ideas unhindered on the Internet.
The legal opponents of the EFF often rely on the second horn of the dilemma. EFF has been in legal battles with agencies of
the US government over many issues, including the unlawful search and seizure of computers (Steve Jackson Games v. The Secret
Service), the right to distribute personal encryption software (Bernstein v. US Department of Justice), Internet censorship
in the form of the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act (ACLU v. Reno and ACLU v. Ashcroft – CDA
and COPA), right to view digital recordings as the viewer sees fit (ALA v. FCC – Broadcast Flag), law enforcement must have
probable cause to track people using their cell phone data (USA v. Pen Register), and their recent cases against the US National
Security Agency (NSA) regarding the extensive wiretapping of US citizens by the NSA with help from major corporations such
as AT&T. These are just a few of the more important cases (see their website for further information, EFF.org). In each of
them, the motivation for the US government has been one of law enforcement. The general argument is that ICTs provide a new
arena for illegal activity such as piracy, hacking, child pornography, drug dealing and terrorism. Without broad abilities
to access data and to limit certain expressions of speech (e.g. encryption, and pornography), the US is not going to be able
to combat these social ills. Since (one assumes) Americans do not want to live in such a society, it is necessary for their
government to acquire the information needed to protect its citizens.
Similarly, at the corporate level, the EFF has confronted companies such as Diebold and Apple Computer, just to name two. Diebold sought to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to sue researchers that were looking into flaws in digital voting machines that Diebold
had built. Claiming that emails outlining flaws in the machines were copyright infringement, they sought to curtail the activities
of the researchers. The EFF contributed to the defence of the researchers and helped win the case. Apple sought to find out
the identities of anonymous sources that had leaked information about an upcoming product to computer news websites; AppleInsider and PowerPage. Again, the EFF successfully litigated to protect the rights of the journalists on the websites
from exposing their sources. In both cases, the companies sought to control information about their products for fear that
releasing any of this information would negatively affect their ability to do business.
7.4.4 Anonymous speech
So far we have reviewed a number of arguments in favour of free speech and, by extension, free speech online, but is it right
to say what one wants provided that one will stand up and identify oneself as the author of those ideas?
At first, it might seem appropriate to require everyone to stand up for the thoughts and ideas they profess online. This requirement
would force people
to have to own up to mistakes, libel or misinformation they were responsible for propagating. Unfortunately, this is also
naïve. Some contents are simply too dangerous to the speaker and can only be disseminated anonymously. The case of Shi Tao,
with which we started our discussion, is a prime example of what can happen when anonymity is lost. An individual is hopelessly
incapable of directly challenging the interests of geopolitical powers and large multinational corporations. The only way
to protect the lives and livelihood of these dissidents is to ensure their anonymity.
A right to anonymous speech has been described as a combination of a right to
privacy and a right to free speech (see Bell
1995). If we support both free speech and privacy, then it would seem that this requires our support for anonymous speech. Anonymous
speech was certainly a value held by many of the technologists and computer scientists that built the Net. Even though the
early
Internet was a project of the US military, it was quickly co-opted by skilled young computer scientists who had been deeply
influenced by the social libertarian culture of the sixties and seventies. The history of the early development of digital
ICTs is wonderfully detailed by John Markoff (Markoff
2005). This disparate group of savants, freethinkers and iconoclasts all shared a love of electronics and a dream of creating
computers that could serve as a kind of personal augmentation device; one that would increase the abilities of the individuals
and allow them to reach higher levels of self-actualization through unparalleled access to the world of human ideas (Markoff
2005). This radical idea was revolutionary at the time, with the cumbersome early PC technologies, but we can now see that it
has come to fruition. The PC, coupled with the Internet, does indeed give us access to great deals of information and provides
us with a multitude of forums within which to engage in all manner of communications and social interactions. These sixties
radicals seem to have fostered a social revolution the likes of which have never been seen on this planet before. Lawrence
Lessig observes in
Code: Version 2.0 that the early version of the Internet was designed in a way that made it hard to regulate. ‘To regulate well, you need to
know (1) who someone is, (2) where they are, and (3) what they are doing’, but none of these abilities were built into the
code of the early Internet (Lessig
2006, p. 23). This led to a period in the early nineties when technologists commonly claimed that modern ICTs would seriously
challenge the abilities of modern nation states to control their citizens, thus unleashing a worldwide social revolution –
the ultimate hack.
This has not turned out to be the case, as code can be written to foster control as well. ‘There is regulation of behavior
on the internet and in cyberspace, but that regulation is imposed primarily through code’ (Lessig
2006, p. 24). So it seems that a new generation of technologists is now in control and fewer of them are interested in social
revolution. This industry is no longer dominated by American companies and software engineers; today the industry has spread
across the globe, and we are seeing a demand for technologies that increase
governmental control over ICTs and the infosphere they foster. Countries like
China want as much control as they can get and many companies, even large US companies such as Cisco, are more than eager
to supply the technology and code they need to create their
‘Golden Shield Project’, the first ICT-enhanced police state (see Fallows
2008, Klein
2008). These new technologies will give what China hopes is unparalleled abilities to monitor and censor Chinese users of the
Internet and to control information flow into and out of the country, as well as protect its systems against hackers and cyber
warfare (Fallows
2008, Klein
2008).
Even if the original design of the Internet was conducive to anonymous speech, it is not clear that future ICTs will be designed
with this in mind. In fact, they could be just as easily built to enhance governmental control rather than challenge it. Without
free anonymous speech there will be little chance for individuals or minority groups to challenge technological hegemonies.
7.4.5 Abuses of free speech and anonymity
Even if we want to support the rights of political dissidents to freely communicate and challenge the status quo, it remains true that some minority interests are far less appealing, such as those interested in propagating things like
pornography or hate speech. However, they too can use ICTs to further their specialized interests. Free speech and anonymity
constitute a double-edged sword that must be used with care. Speech and communications that one would never consider broaching
in general public settings are commonplace fare in certain locations on the Internet. There is nothing too extreme, too violent
or too perverse for publication on the Net. Just as any hobbyist can find an instant community of fellow enthusiasts on the
Web, so too can any aficionado of any particular sexual practice. This is also the case when it comes to hate speech and extremist
political views and other potentially harmful speech acts.
A perennial problem for free speech philosophy is to distinguish objectionable speech from speech worth protecting. There
is a vast array of cultural opinions on what is or is not objectionable speech.
The cultural distinctions can be fairly subtle. For instance, European countries tend to be less interested in limiting pornography
on the Web, whereas there have been a number of unsuccessful political attempts to censor web-based pornography in the United
States. The Child Online Protection Act is the latest US legislation that attempts to curtail online pornography or at least its access
by children. But when it comes to limiting the speech of hate groups, we find just the opposite, with European countries seeking
to limit the activities of certain groups such as neo-Nazis on and off the Internet.
We live in the golden age of pornography. It is hard to pin down exactly how much this industry is worth but it was reported
in 2006 to be around $97 billion dollars with
China being the top producer at $27.4 billion (Business Services Industry
2007). There has never been a time where so much of this material has been so easily available to such a broad cross-section of
the global society so cheaply, and this is the direct result of the spread of ICTs. ‘Every second $3,075.64 is spent on pornography,
28,258 internet users view pornography and 372 internet users type adult search terms into search engines’, with the US and
the EU as the major producers of pornographic websites (Business Services Industry
2007).
While this industry is as old as image making itself, it has usually remained an underground business, that is until ICTs
made it easy to distribute and consume in the relative privacy of one's own home. The personal computer took off from where
personal video devices like the VCR left off having opened the door to home video porn. Now, a wide variety of material is
available to any Internet user and much of that content is free. In fact the numbers quoted above do not take into account
‘a nearly infinite supply of free, amateur videos from countless user-generated sites’ that are challenging the revenues of
the traditional purveyors of pornography (Schiffman
2008).
Before we get too far along on this topic, it must be acknowledged that it is difficult defining just what pornography is. It is largely a cultural or even personal distinction that one makes, meaning that some
individuals and cultures have very low tolerances while others are quite comfortable with even explicit images and depictions
of sexual acts. So there will be no final agreement on a strict definition of pornography.
There is no doubt that there are healthy and artistic ways of discussing and depicting human sexuality in all the various
media we communicate in. For our purposes, here I will deem these depictions unproblematic and I will refer to those as
erotic stories and images. There is a tradition in philosophy that finds great value in eroticism of this sort; even
Socrates seems to have made a strong claim in favour of the erotic, which was transcribed in
Plato's
Symposium (see Plato
1993). So one may wish to resist the temptation to place a negative value on all media depictions of sexuality, even if it turns
out that there is actually very little healthy erotic material existent online. For our purposes, we may reserve the word
‘pornography’ for text and images that do not positively challenge, enhance or expand one's understanding of human sexuality
but instead demean, diminish and degrade the authors, actors and observers of the work in question. Simply put, if the piece
does not contribute to the good of everyone involved in its production and consumption, then it is of dubious worth, may be
qualified as pornography and indeed might be a morally justified candidate for
censorship. This is not to say that any
work concerning human sexuality that challenges the preconceived norms of a society is pornography. For instance, it is possible
that the work enhances the good of its authors and audience but offends the sensibilities of the society at large. This might
just be a failing of the society at large and, in this case, the work is not harmful pornography and deserves protection.
All this falls nicely in line with Mill's Principle of Harm discussed above. Erotic contents may enhance or challenge a society and are protected by free speech rights,
whereas pornography creates harm and is therefore not protected by a right to free speech. It is important to note that would-be
censors must provide proof of harm; and that harm must be significant, mere offence is not enough. Unfortunately one does
not have to work very hard to find significantly harmful pornography easily available online.
Pornography is significantly harmful in three general situations: (1) its production, (2) its consumption and (3) its effects
on the society in general. An obvious example of the first type of harm occurs in the production of child pornography. There
is clear victimization that occurs, as children are forced into behaviour inappropriate for their age. As the philosopher
and computer scientist Alison Adam has observed, this harm can be extremely long lasting, not only because of the potentially
permanent damages inflicted psychologically on the children involved, but also because, even if the perpetrators are caught
and prosecuted, the images they disseminated on the Net are virtually impossible to eradicate and linger forever in the dark
corners of the Web (Adam
2002, p. 140).
The second type of harm occurs more often than one may think. There is no passive way to experience pornography, it is designed
to arouse strong emotions and this can be victimizing when the images simultaneously arouse the viewer sexually and combine
that with fear or violence. One is reminded of the famous quote from the philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you’ (Nietzsche
2003, p. 69). The viewer of violent pornography is changed and it will not be for the better. ICTs may act as a trigger of latent
deviations in individuals that otherwise may have never come to the surface. ICTs provide easy access for persons to be exposed
to and seduced by certain sexual deviations. They might also form online friendships with other disturbed individuals with
whom they trade illicit material and then goad each other into antisocial behaviour in the real world, which these individuals
might have never contemplated attempting on their own (Adam
2002, p. 140, Lessig
2006, p. 16). For example, it is likely that the consumption of child pornography has grown and that there is a link between its
growth and the growth of the Internet (Adam
2002, p. 140).
Finally, the third area can be exemplified by the way in which pornography can contribute to a society that is threatening
and dismissive of
women's interests. Men have been the largest audience for pornography and many
feminist philosophical theorists see pornography as a possible means of furthering the social control of women (see Adam
2002). Pornography socializes men to see women as vulnerable submissive objects. It is argued that someone deeply involved in
consuming this media will be less capable of having authentic relationships with women. Of course, this criticism fails to
consider that there is homosexual pornography and explicit material produced by and for women and couples. However, since
this material is less common, the main criticism levelled against pornography stands. It does make certain large spaces in
cyberspace inhospitable to women.
There are many more possible examples of the social acid produced by harmful pornography and this world is only possible through
the anonymity provided by the Web for both the producers and consumers of pornographic media.
One last great excess that can occur when anonymity and deviant behaviour are mixed is
cyberstalking. Stalking is certainly not a new phenomenon but ICTs have made this behaviour much easier. The Web gives each
of us the powers of a private detective and in the hands of an obsessed individual this can prove dangerous. This phenomenon
can also make the net an unsafe place for women and children since the overwhelming majority of stalkers are men (Adam
2002)
.
Another social evil that has followed our migration to the Net and found a fertile atmosphere to grow is hate speech, both
racial and religious. Again, the Principle of Harm can be used to distinguish hate speech from the heated and vigorous debates that race and religion can both
engender. For a speech act to count as hate speech it must be motivated by hate and directed at the harm of other racial or
religious individuals or groups.
The oldest hate-based website is
Stormfront.org, the brainchild of Don Black, a notorious member of the Ku Klux Klan. Stormfront.org boasts dozens of individual
forum topics, from ‘Ideology and Philosophy’ to ‘privacy and security’ and white supremacist's youth and women's issues. There
are links on this site to podcasts, blogs, projects and events, along with many thousands of individual posts. At any time,
there are hundreds of users from all over the world logged on. It is as active as any popular website and is run by a full-time
staff (see Kim
2005). If it weren't for the occasional use of German gothic text, one might not notice this was a hate site, as it claims to
be simply a place for truth to be told, ‘allowing people access to information not filtered by the “media monopoly”’. Stormfront
has taken on the ‘Friendly Fascist’ façade and one has to enter into the chat areas to find blatant hate speech offered by
its users. Don Black himself is careful to never cross the line. He personally and wisely counsels his patrons to remember
that ‘words have consequences’, and asks that they follow certain rules for posting such
as: ‘No profanity’, and ‘[a]void racial epithets’. A perusal of the site will convince any reader that these rules are not
always followed. The forum members with monikers such as Lillywhite37, Krieger Germaniens14 and NationalistPride, to name
a few, use the relative anonymity of the Stormfront forum to broach topics that range from the mundane to high treason and
from this site one can find links to other sites that will eventually lead to more explicit hate sites. On this forum, lip
service is paid to free speech rights, there is even a forum to post counter arguments. Stormfront.org walks a razor's edge,
careful not to implicate its owners or moderators in any hate speech that is easily identifiable. But it does provide a space
for like-minded racists to meet and mingle, sharing ideas and friendships that do have real-world consequence
.
The Southern Poverty Law Center cites Cass Sunstein, the University of Chicago law professor who wrote the 2001 book
republic.com that explains: ‘“Extremists and hate-filled sites tend to attract likeminded people who, if isolated, could come to their
senses.” Likeminded people talking to one another, Sunstein says, “tend to become more extremist”’ (Kim
2005, p. 2). The Internet can be a great place to spark political debate and momentum, as anyone who witnessed
Barack Obama's 2008 US presidential election can attest to. But this has a dark side as well. As Joe Trippi, who organized
the online portion of Howard Dean's presidential campaign, said, ‘I'd hate to think, what
Hitler could've done with the internet’ (Kim
2005, p. 3)
.
The Gossip 2.0 phenomenon is another place where free speech and privacy collide head-on. This is antisocial networking, where
the dark side of social interaction is leveraged by ICTs to gain a force and audience far beyond the restroom walls where
this kind of communication is typically found. Celebrity gossip has always been an issue for people in the public eye, but
now everyone on a university campus can experience the pain and humiliation of having lies, half-truths and secrets from their
love lives posted to the most popular instance of this new phenomenon –
Juicy Campus. Founded in August 2007, Juicy Campus has already gained a great deal of infamy for the content of the posts
that are placed anonymously on the site.
1While the site boasts, on its privacy statement, that it ensures complete anonymity for its users, the people who are the
subjects of those posts are not granted any privacy rights. The posts are mostly about sex, parties and gossip, not about
legitimate issues in campus life. People are clearly identified by first and last names and the posts usually invite others
to comment as well. The entries range from mildly humorous to potentially libellous but always spurious. It is difficult to
see what good a gossip site like Juicy Campus can
add to campus life, but it is easy to see the harm it has already fostered. The
International Herald Tribune reported in March 2008 a case in which a student at Yale had his past as an actor in a pornographic video revealed on Juicy
Campus complete with a link to the video in question; the post was viewed by many hundreds of his classmates and his reputation
on campus devastated (Morgan
2008)
.
Rights and computer ethics is one of the primary concerns of our time. This moment in history is witnessing great technological
change which is fundamentally challenging and complicating our claims to rights such as free speech and privacy. Given that ICTs are global technologies, and that they can be designed to enhance or limit free speech and privacy,
this demands that we come to some sort of global consensus on these issues. Since, as we have seen, privacy and free speech
can be at odds when someone wants to post your private concerns, one or the other right will have to be curtailed to some
extent. These decisions will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, which means there will be an explosion of opportunities
in local and international law and policy activity around these issues.
Our personal data are a gold mine when aggregated with everyone else's and turned into an easily searchable database for advertisers,
politicians, insurance providers and so forth. In the coming few decades, we will have to develop a global policy on information
privacy. In this chapter, we have seen strong philosophical arguments in favour of information privacy. What remains to be
seen is whether this will influence the legislatures around the world. Will we adopt strong data protection like the EU has
with its Data Protection Act, or will we just pay lip service to privacy issues but allow governments and corporations to abuse those
rights as we have seen happen in most of the rest of the world, including the US? The answer is unclear.
Protecting free speech is another global concern. Protecting the rights of dissidents and political revolutionaries comes
at the cost of tolerating speech we find offensive. The key to understanding how to properly regulate communications is to
adopt the Principle of Harm and to realize that mere offence is not harm. Thus we can tolerate healthy debate but carefully regulate
hate speech; we can enjoy healthy and necessary converse about human sexuality, while working to limit pornography that causes
harm to individuals and society at large.
ICTs are creating a worldwide
surveillance society. The fear of global terrorism and the illicit drug trade has caused governments to support more and better
surveillance. The glut of information that these systems produce is being managed by more artificially intelligent systems,
or ambient intelligence, that, for instance, analyse the behaviour and facial expressions and other biometrics of every member
in a crowd and flag certain individuals as
potential shoplifters, dangerous individuals or terrorists and then create a log of that person's activities that can be monitored
by human agents later
. This same sort of information can also be collected on each and every one of us, to be used by advertisers and marketers
to track our
shopping and buying behaviour both online and off. These legitimate governmental and private interests are taking us into
a world that is something like a strange mix of Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World (Huxley
2006) and a well-run theme park. This emerging world is strikingly prevalent in online worlds like
Second Life,
World of Warcraft, and others where the
government on these games is a commercial entity and those running it may be fabulous programmers and designers but unskilled in political
philosophy, ethical theory and policy, thus creating the climate for abuse (see Ludlow and Wallace
2007, Ludlow
1996).
As we have learned from Lawrence Lessig, the
designers and code writers for ICTs are the real power behind securing the rights we want (Lessig
2006). Law and policy will always be behind these technologies because technology changes so quickly. If we are going to continue
to enjoy the rights that we care about, then it is going to be due to the work done by technologists and technological watchdog
groups like the
Electronic Frontier Foundation today. It is vital that those studying to be technologists are trained in computer ethics,
as they are the only hope that we have in securing ethical ICTs. Without this training we can expect ICTs to take us into
a strange new world where none of us will feel comfortable and where living a good life will be more difficult if not impossible
.
A final thought worth pondering is whether future generations will even see our interest in securing rights and computer ethics
as a legitimate one. It would seem that younger generations do not care that much about
privacy rights, given their complete lack of propriety on social networking sites like
MySpace and Facebook. People are quite willing to give away the most intimate facts about themselves to millions of potential
viewers. In fact, Facebook is a wonderful place for would-be identity thieves to collect all kinds of useful tidbits like,
for instance, a user's mother's maiden name or the name of a pet, which can then be used to bypass security in online banking,
etc. (ZDNet July
2007). While it is indeed true that many young people are sharing way too much information about themselves online, it is probably
due to naivety. Most users will greatly alter their habits once they find out what can happen to them. And as more and more
of them have this experience, we may find that they mature into stalwart defenders of privacy.
At the beginning of this chapter, we discussed how our use of ICTs creates a
digital footprint, one that can be mined by others for valuable information. If we extrapolate a little on the technology
already available, such as the Internet,
smart phones like the iPhone, automatic data collecting, personal robotics, etc. we might see evolving a device that could
record one's own digital footprint. This is exactly what Microsoft researchers have proposed with the
MyLifeBits project, which is supposed to collect every aspect of ones digital footprint. ‘It is a system for storing all of
one's digital media, including documents, images, sounds, and videos’ (Gemmel
et al. 2002). A much more advanced device like this is imagined by the science fiction writer Rudy Rucker, a device he calls the
Lifebox (Rucker
2006). This device automatically collects all the information surrounding its user as they live their life, everything they do,
say, look at, smell, hear, etc., the ultimate multimedia diary. This would result in a huge amount of data, perhaps a petaflop
or so, which, from the point of view of technology, is not really all that much memory space considering how quickly our ability
to store this information is progressing (Rucker
2006, p. 279). Armed with a Lifebox, one could then recall and even relive in a way any experience one ever had or just keep the
Lifebox as a complete record of one's life. This would be a fabulous device indeed. Yet it is easy to imagine the problems
with the complete transparency in privacy that would result from this. Nothing would ultimately be secret, every moment of
the life of every person that had one could be reconstructed in intimate detail. Why build one? Our wish for perfect memory
and longevity may just overwhelm any vestigial interest in privacy we may have at that time perhaps leading to the ultimate
erosion of our right to privacy
.
As things like Lifeboxes, digital assistants and other artificial agents evolve, they will not only challenge our privacy
rights, they may even evolve to want these rights for themselves. As strange as this advanced artificially intelligent technology
sounds, it is actually not that far-fetched. The beginnings of it were discussed at the start of this chapter. If our personal
individual agency is formed from informational constructs as some have argued (Floridi and Sanders
2004, Floridi
2003, Rucker
2006, Sullins
2008, Turing
1950), then some information constructs may evolve significant artificial agency up to a level of competence similar to our own.
In this case, they may be deserving of moral consideration for the same reason we, animals, ecosystems and corporations are
already (Floridi and Sanders
2004, Floridi
2003, Sullins
2007,
2006a,
2006b). Dealing with this is a very interesting problem. Perhaps, with the advent of these artificial agents, we must also provide
them with a kind of machine morality (Anderson and Anderson
2007, Wallach and Allen
2008). The ethics of artificial agents will be addressed in
Chapters 12 and
13 of this volume, but if we make the right decisions then perhaps the future of computer ethics just may evolve to fulfil our
desire for secure free speech and privacy rights
.