NATS 1700 6.0 COMPUTERS,  INFORMATION  AND  SOCIETY

Lecture 20: Privacy, Freedom and Censorship

| Previous | Next | Syllabus | Selected References | Home |

| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |

 

Introduction

  • A very good discussion of the problems of democracy on the internet can be found in Fred Evans' article Cyberspace and the Concept of Democracy, on FirstMonday Journal.

  • An important survey, Privacy & Human Rights 2003 has has been released by EPIC and Privacy International. EPIC maintains also previous versions of the report reaching back to 1998. Here is the general statement from the 2000 report: "This survey, by EPIC and Privacy International, reviews the state of privacy in over fifty countries around the world. The survey examines a wide range of privacy issues including, data protection, telephone tapping, genetic databases, ID systems and freedom of information laws. The report finds that there is a worldwide recognition of privacy as a fundamental human right. Many countries around the world are enacting comprehenisve data protection law to safeguard individual privacy increase. However at the same time, privacy is increasingly being undermined by technical advances and the demands of intelligence and law enforcement agencies for increase surveillance powers. There is a strong need for improved oversight and stricter enforcement of current laws to ensure that legal protections are not ignored as threats to personal privacy increase." Read at least the executive summary.

  • You may also refer back to  Lecture 14.  Data warehousing and data mining pose serious risks for privacy, because they allow the possibility of pooling together all sorts of information concerning individuals. The recent attempt, subsequently scrapped due to widespread public concerns, by the Canadian Government to create a comprehensive database with information on all of its citizens, is a troubling example.

  • Good starting points are the  Freedom Forum : "a nonpartisan foundation dedicated to free press, free speech and free spirit for all people." ; and  The Student Press Law Center . "Since 1974, the Student Press Law Center has been the nation's only legal assistance agency devoted exclusively to educating high school and college journalists about the rights and responsibilities embodied in the First Amendment and supporting the student news media in their struggle to cover important issues free from censorship. The Center provides free legal advice and information as well as low-cost educational materials for student journalists on a wide variety of legal topics."
    Visit The Electronic Frontier Foundation or The Center for Democracy & Technology,  where you can read about the latest news.
    To see what is done in Europe, visit Privacy International, a London-based "human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations;"  Statewatch, a site devoted to "monitoring the state and civil liberties in the European Union," or the Foundation for Information Policy Research, which "is an independent body that studies the interaction between information technology and society. [Their] goal is to identify technical developments with significant social impact, commission research into public policy alternatives, and promote public understanding and dialogue between technologists and policy-makers in the UK and Europe."

  • Index on Censorship  widens the debates on freedom of expression with some of the world's best writers. Through interviews, reportage, banned literature and polemic, [...and] shows how free speech affects the political issues of the moment.

  • The Univerity of Leeds has a long list of links to  Communications Policy Re/sources

  • The  American Civil Liberties Union,  is a good source of news and actual case histories. Study some of them in detail, starting with the sections on Disability Rights, Free Speech, and Privacy & Technology.

  • Look at some of the issues from a different cultural point of view:

  • The Canadian Conservative Forum.  Many interesting links ("Links shown with [danger symbol] are not reliably conservative.")

  • A short but moving speech Ursula Franklin gave at the 18th International Privacy & Data Protection Conference:  Read !  Stormy Weather: Conflicting Forces in the Information Society. This speech is part of a rich collection of documents and information managed by Privacy Commissioner of Canada .

  • IFEX , in addition to news from all over the world, carries a very extensive list of links to related sites.

 
Topics

  • Article 19 of the 1948 UN  Read !  Universal Declaration of Human Rights  affirms

    • Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

    And Article 10.1 of  Read !  The European Convention on Human Rights (1950) proclaims

    • Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information an ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

  • On the other hand, as Charles Mann points out in the review referred to in the Introduction above, "Corporate interests want to make cyberspace safe for e-commerce; nations want to ensure that their sovereignty isn't flouted there. Unfortunately, the underlying software of the Internet was not written with either capitalism or nationalism in mind."

  • It is important to notice that some form of regulated balance between the private and the public was already present in some of the most ancient civilizations such as Greece and China. However, it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that, in connection with the rapid expansion of daily newspapers, the first attempts were made to define and protect explicitly freedom of expression. For instance, in 1890 two Boston lawyers published a pioneering article on  Read !  Right of Privacy  in the Harvard Law Review (Harvard Law Review 4 (1890): 195). They argued that "Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society...Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life, and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that 'what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the housetops.'..The right to privacy, limited as such right must necessarily be, has already found expression in the law of France. It remains to consider what are the limitations of this right to privacy, and what remedies may be granted for the enforcement of the right. To determine in advance of experience the exact line at which the dignity and convenience of the individual must yield to the demands of the public welfare or of private justice would be a difficult task; but the more general rules are furnished by the legal analogies already developed in the law of slander and libel, and in the law of literary and artistic property."

  • The problem is indeed a difficult one, as it involves not only the right of free expression on the part of any individual, but also the right of any individual "to seek, receive and impart information." The solution lies in a suitable interface between these two rights. But such boundary is extremely difficult to draw, also because, as pointed out above, other parties and other interests are involved. If a business wishes to maximize the market for its products or services, it is probably going to cater to as wide--and thus, as average--a customer population as possible, and thus implicitly to uphold the moral standards of the majority. But such a stance is bound to clash with the rights of those who do not share these standards. In other words, and focusing now on the Internet, to make cyberspace 'safe' for business de facto implies problems for free expression. These problems are exacerbated by the very nature of the Internet, which eludes national boundaries and thus local laws.

  • There is in addition a more subtle but equally important consideration. The Internet is, among other things, a huge market. International, global agreements which would constrain the behavior of 'netizens' are likely to stunt the growth and perhaps the very existence of the Internet, which, we must always remember, is an organic, spontaneous, self-organizing structure. This is in some ways analogous to the 'blind spot' of the Industrial Revolution, as pointed out by Ursula Franklin (op. cit., p. 60): "The proponents of technology in the 1840s were very enthusiastic about replacing workers with machines. But somehow...they [did not realize] that while production could be carried out with few workers and still run to high outputs, buyers would be needed for these outputs...machines can produce, but it usually people who consume." In the present context, a 'safe' Internet still needs netizens.

  • At the moment it is even difficult to assess the current balance between freedom of expression and regulation of such freedom. The two sides of the debate can point at various victories and defeats in their struggles. See for example  Walmart Foundation Uses Copyright to Curtail Griper,  On the other hand, CNN, in an article entitled  IBM To Disable Serial Number in Pentium III, we read that "IBM will disable the feature at the BIOS level so that 'if a consumer wants to enable the feature, they will have to do it themselves, using a BIOS setup option.'" Intel had surreptitiously attempted to hard-code in its Pentium III chip an identifying serial number that could be used to track computers with such chip across the Internet.  In the websites suggested in the Introduction you can find many other examples.

  • Shopping on the Internet creates practical problems that also involve issues of privacy and security. "Digital authentication systems are expected to become an essential part of doing business via the Internet. Based on a range of encryption techniques, digital signature systems allow people and organizations to electronically certify such features as their identity, their ability to pay, or the authenticity of an electronic document. Policies governing the collection of information for digital signatures, and the architecture and legal liabilities associated with these technologies, raise important privacy and consumer protection issues." [ from Identity, Authentication & Digital Certificates, at the Center for Democracy & Technology ]

     

    Philip R Zimmermann

    Philip Zimmermann, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy

  • A very interesting chapter in the history of these issues is the incredible saga Phil Zimmermann went through because of his Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP for short, software. This technology has now become "the world's de facto standard for email encryption and authentication, with over 6 million users." [ from PGP Security ]  For a good profile of Phil Zimmermann, check Phil Zimmermann: Programmer as Celebrity. You may also want to read  Read !  Cypher Wars: Pretty Good Privacy Gets Pretty Legal  in the WIRED Archive. An interesting twist in this story, which illustrates the chaos that surrounds issues of privacy and freedom of speech in the Internet, is that while in the US the actual PGP program, until very recently, was considered of military strategic importance and thus subject to export restrictions, the actual printed code was not. This loophole was exploited by some European scientists, who (with the support of Zimmermann) imported the huge volume of code and scanned it, thus obtaining the program without violating US export regulations. Read the  Read !  Frequently Asked Questions about PGPi,  which includes interesting historical details.

  • I do not wish to finish this lecture leaving the impression that I side without any reservations with the pro-freedom position. Certainly I do not condone the abuses that pornography websites, particularly those devoted to child pornography, perpetrate claiming to exercise their right of free speech. But even here there are problems: where do we draw the boundaries between freedom and license? Where is the line between freedom of and freedom from?

 
Questions and Exercises

  • Is there a relationship between property rights and free speech rights? Support your answer with one example.

  • It is often stated that the problems of property and privacy on the Internet are new. Do you agree or disagree? Why?

 

Last Modification Date: 22 March 2010
Picture Credits: EFF  ,  PGP Security