SOSC 2080/89 - Two Additional Articles for
First Term – Required for Mid-Term Test on December 11,
2002
1. “Political Privacy and Online Politics: How E-Campaigning
Threatens Voter Privacy” By Christopher D Hunter.
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_2/hunter/index.html
(Unfortunately some of the text is missing when you print
it out because they didn’t put the graphics in properly.
You can cut and paste the missing text into a text file and
then add it to the print-out which is what I’ve done
below)
2. “Power and Interdependence in the Information Age,
“ by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye.
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/prg/nye/power.pdf
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MISSING TEXT when printing the Hunter article:
Graphic #1 HERE
Text between 2 graphics:
What are the possible consequences of such cavalier treatment
of voters personal information? If voters become aware of
the practices described above they may well simply disengage
from political activity. As Kim Alexander, president of the
California Voter Foundation notes, "It's going to result
in people not wanting to register at all because their personal
information can be abused" (cited in Nuckols, 2000).
Graphic #2.HERE
People may similarly be deterred from visiting controversial
candidate, party, or issue Web sites for fear that their surfing
behavior will be recorded by the likes of Aristotle and MatchLogic,
and turned into a profile which may end up in the wrong hands.
This type of profiling would seem to be a clear violation
of the spirit of associational privacy.
Such concerns are all the more real in the wake of the September
11 terrorist attack. Already one data marketer, Acxiom, has
announced a willingness to sell its consumer purchasing data
to the government in order to better profile airline passengers
(Acxiom, 2001). This data can now be used by federal agencies
to target individuals fitting some profile. The government
will not be using this information to sell a certain product,
but to target individuals for additional surveillance. Also
in response to September 11, Congress passed the USA Patriot
Act which gives law enforcement agencies unprecedented new
surveillance powers. Among these new powers is the ability
to easily obtain wiretaps for Internet activity. As Marc Rotenberg
(2001) of the Electronic Privacy Information Center notes,
the police could now use 'Carnivore' to routinely capture
clickstream data from Internet users - including the Web sites
visited and the pages downloaded - under the same low standards
that currently permit government access to telephone numbers
dialed." The result may be the profiling and harassment
of citizens who simply visit the Web sites of controversial
political organizations or espouse radical viewpoints in political
chat rooms and newsgroups. As privacy advocate Jerry Berman
comments:
"The attorney general is making a full-court press on
the Internet. They want to do a lot of data mining and investigations
on the Internet, and because they are looking for a needle
in a haystack, they are going to conduct investigations that
take them to the outer circle ... The trouble with the [Patriot
Act] is that it's very sweeping and it can apply not just
to suspected terrorists but people and organizations that
may be engaged in lawful actions" (cited in Olsen, 2001).
Concerns over increased government surveillance already seem
to be having a chilling effect on online political discourse.
According to a November 2001 survey commissioned by the Democracy
Online Project (2001), "12 percent of Americans who use
the Internet to discuss or learn about politics and government
are less willing to discuss politics and government online"
as a result of the Patriot Act. While the U.S. clearly needs
new surveillance capabilities to prevent future acts of terrorism,
it must make sure that these new powers do not chill politicaldiscourse
or dissent (be it from a soap box or a chat room), or interfere
with Constitutional rights to associational privacy and anonymous
speech.
A final danger of political profiling and targeting is a
hypersegmented public sphere where citizens are fed highly
personalized messages and therefore unable to escape their
individualized media bubbles to discuss larger societal issues
(Turow, 1997). Fox nicely describes the downside of an overly
personalized politics: "Imagine receiving from a candidate
personalized messages that are designed for your demographic
group and political affiliation. You'd never hear an opposing
view. You'd be pampered with predigested politics, a Muzak
soundtrack to the movie of your own choosing" [33]. Even
more troublesome is the flip side of targeting: large numbers
of citizens whose profiles indicate that they are unlikely
to vote simply wont receive any political information. As
Gandy [34] notes, "Excluding persons from the flow of
information because they have been deemed unlikely to vote
means that the people who are most in need of information
are least likely to receive it." The potential for political
profiling techniques to create a nation of hypersegmented
information haves, and an underclass of information have-nots,
clearly does not bode well for our notions of an informed,
deliberative, and vibrant democracy.
FEC Disclosure and the Threat to Political Privacy and
Anonymous Speech
Few people would take issue with the Federal Election Commission's
worthy goals of limiting money's role in elections, preventing
corruption, ensuring competitive elections, and improving
the quality of electoral debate [35]. The FEC seeks to achieve
these goals primarily through mandatory disclosure of campaign
contributions by individuals, parties, and other groups seeking
to influence the electoral process. Unfortunately, FEC disclosure
rules- crafted in the 1970s, before the rise of fully searchable
Web accessible databases and assuming a radically different
media environment - now have the potential to violate citizens
political privacy and discourage online political speech.
At the core of the FEC rules….
