“It wasn’t a case of ‘We caught you, you skunk.’ It started with a guy who stood up and said, ‘I got a problem, I made the problem, let’s fix the problem.’ If you’re gonna kill a guy like LeMessurier, why should anybody ever talk?” http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/ce131/citicorp1.htm Cf. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/nyregion/21lemessurier.html
US Bill To Update Key Digital Privacy Law – Summary: http://leahy.senate.gov/press/press_releases/release/?id=b6d1f687-f2f7-48a4-80bc-29e3c5f758f2#Summary
“[...] The upshot? If the government wants to track your cell phone or seize your email or read your private IMs or social network messages, the bill would require that it first go to court and get a search warrant based on probable cause. [...]
The bill isn’t absolutely free of problems: although it clearly would require a warrant for ongoing tracking of your cell phone, it would also and unfortunately preserve the current statutory rule allowing the government to get historical records of your location without probable cause. It also expands the government’s authority to use National Security Letters https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters to obtain rich transactional data about who you communicate with online and when, without probable cause or court oversight. You can count on EFF to press for these problems to be fixed, and for all of the DDP principles to be addressed, as the bill proceeds through Congress.
However, as the start of the process of updating ECPA for the always-on, location-enabled technology of the 21st century, Senator Leahy’s bill represents an incredibly important step in the right direction, and we at EFF look forward to working with Senator Leahy and others in Congress as they work to create new laws to better protect your online and mobile privacy. [...]” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/eff-applauds-new-electronic-privacy-bill-tells
David J. Chalmers: The Singularity – A Philosophical Analysis http://consc.net/papers/singularity.pdf
Netflix Is Killing BitTorrent in the United States http://torrentfreak.com/netflix-is-killing-bittorrent-in-the-us-110427/
Competing with free: anime site treats piracy as a market failure http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/competing-with-free-anime-site-treats-piracy-as-a-market-failure.ars
Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/the-only-way-to-stop-piracy-is-to-cut-prices
iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears
iPad’s privacy sucks http://privacysucks.com/blog/2011/04/ipads-privacy-sucks/
Your privacy sucks: http://privacysucks.com/
“There is a danger that time is running out, is the technological genie already out of the ethical bottle, embarking us all on an incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality?”
The UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems – Joint Doctrine Note 2/2011 http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/DDE54504-AF8E-4A4C-8710-514C6FB66D67/0/20110401JDN211UASv1WebU.pdf
What would help is if the Supreme Court (and indeed corporate law in general) adopted a clear principle when it comes to the analogy between artificial persons and real ones: that companies should be treated as people only in so far as it is expedient. They clearly need to be able to enter into contracts just like individuals. But they should not be treated as if they experience such essentially human emotions as embarrassment and a desire for self-expression. Thus they should not have the same rights to privacy and political freedom as a citizen, but should have only as much of a right to confidentiality and political participation as is helpful for the efficient functioning of business (including letting firms contribute to the public debate on the regulation of business). Companies—or rather their bosses and owners—should welcome such constraints: any further “rights” would, sooner or later, be matched by onerous responsibilities.
Schumpeter
social media bill of rights:
“Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service
Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand
Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and justification
Empowerment: Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility
Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies
Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others
Control: Let me control my data, and don’t facilitate sharing it unless I agree first
Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see my data.
Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data
Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised
Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it.
Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission.
Right to appeal: Allow me to appeal punitive actions
Right to withdraw: Allow me to delete my account, and remove my data” http://snubillofrights.com/
Taxes & Voting: “[...] Thoreau [...] argues that people should be allowed to decide to not pay their taxes if they decide to withdraw from the political system. He does, however, make a point of saying that people should pay for what they use, such as paying the highway tax if one uses the highway. [...]” http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2695
Seven Laws of Noah: “This code is a set of moral imperatives that, according to the Talmud, were given by God as a binding set of laws for the “children of Noah” – that is, all of humankind. According to Judaism, any non-Jew who lives according to these laws is regarded as a Righteous Gentile, and is assured of a place in the world to come (Olam Haba), the final reward of the righteous.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
Experimental Philosophy and the Problem of Free Will: “A deterministic universe [is one] in which “Every decision is completely caused by what happened before the decision—given the past, each decision has to happen the way that it does.” … One group of participants was asked whether it is possible for anyone to be morally responsible for their actions in such a universe. These participants tended to say that it is not possible to be morally responsible in that universe. That question about moral responsibility is, of course, pitched at an abstract level.
Another group of participants was presented instead with a concrete case of a man who killed his family. That provoked a much different response. When presented with a concrete case of man performing a reprehensible action, people tended to say that the man was fully morally responsible for his actions, even when set in a deterministic universe. Indeed, concrete cases of bad behavior lead people to attribute responsibility, even when the action is caused by a neurological disorder. […]
People are pulled in different directions because different mental mechanisms are implicated in different conditions.” https://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6023/1401.abstract via http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/03/responsibility-is-near.html
“The only way to stop piracy is to cut prices. That’s the verdict of a major new academic study that reckons copyright theft won’t be halted by ‘three strikes’ broadband disconnections, increasing censorship or draconian new laws brought in under the anti-counterfeiting treaty ACTA.
The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council, reports that illegal copying of movies, music, video games and software is “better described as a global pricing problem” – and the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares.
The three-year study into media piracy in emerging economies concentrated on countries such as Russia, Mexico and India, where piracy is endemic.
The academics concluded that societies where piracy is rife are no more immoral, or less willing to pay for content – the problem is that in those parts of the world, legitimate CDs, DVDs and software are five to ten times higher relative to local incomes than they are in the US and Europe.
No amount of anti-piracy enforcement will change the economics that drive copyright theft, say the report’s authors. They claim to have seen, “little evidence – and indeed few claims – that enforcement efforts to date have had any effect whatsoever on the overall supply of pirated goods. Our work suggests, rather, that piracy has grown dramatically by most measures in the past decade. [...]
The report condemns what it calls the “strong moralization of the debate” about an issue that the authors claim is really a matter of price and consumer demand.
Interestingly, the report itself is distributed under a ‘Consumer’s Dilemma’ licence that charges $8 to residents of ‘high-income’ countries – but offers it free for non-commercial use everywhere else.” http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/3/15/cutting-prices-only-way-stop-piracy/”
Piracy isn’t just about price http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/piracy-price-manifesto.html
Ten Reasons Not to Abolish Slavery http://mises.org/daily/5076/Ten-Reasons-Not-to-Abolish-Slavery
“security concerns” are the new black(out) – the means by which those who are meant to enforce the law equally instead pre-emptively reward bullying mobsters who have total contempt for it.
Mark Steyn
“Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) [...] has now arrested someone and charged him with criminal copyright infringement, such that he’s now facing five years in jail (as well as fines). This is interesting, because when that domain was seized, we had noted that channelsurfing did not appear to host any content itself, but merely embedded content from other sites (Cf. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110202/01203012918/homeland-security-domain-seizures-raise-more-questions-is-embedding-video-criminal-infringement.shtml?cid=195 ). That raises an awful lot of serious questions: specifically, what part of copyright law is infringed here. The site does not host any of the content. It does not make any copies. It does not distribute the content. All it does is put in a snippet of code that a user’s web browser then uses to request content from another site.” http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110303/16584013356/ice-arrests-operator-seized-domain-charges-him-with-criminal-copyright-infringement.shtml
Supreme Court Backs Government Transparency Over Corporate Privacy Claims https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/supreme-court-backs-government-transparency-over
“One plausible scenario for the next few centuries is that we build an AI as smart as we are at designing AI, which means it could improve its own intelligence very quickly, which means it would soon become a superintelligent machine, with almost unlimited power to accomplish whatever it desires.
So we need to consider carefully how to program its desires, so that it doesn’t kill us all.
Presumably, this is a matter of ethics. Which ethical theory should we use to program the goal system of a future superintelligence?” Desirism and Friendly AI http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=14505
Download: From Dictatorship to Democracy – A Conceptual Framework for Liberation http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html Cf. Egypt’s revolution vindicates Gene Sharp’s theory of nonviolent activism https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=egypts-revolution-vindicates-gene-s-2011-02-11
The Trouble With “Balance” Metaphors “[...] Perhaps the most obvious problem with balancing metaphors is that they suggest a relationship that is always, by necessity, zero sum: If one side rises, the other must fall in exact proportion. Also implicit in balancing talk is the idea that equilibrium is the ideal, and anything that upsets that balance is a change for the worse. That’s probably true if you’re walking a tightrope, but it clearly doesn’t hold in other cases. [...]
the familiar trope of “balancing privacy and security” is a source of constant frustration to privacy advocates, because while there are clearly sometimes tradeoffs between the two, it often seems that the zero-sum rhetoric of “balancing” leads people to view them as always in conflict. This is, I suspect, the source of much of the psychological appeal of “security theater”: If we implicitly think of privacy and security as balanced on a scale, a loss of privacy is ipso facto a gain in security. It sounds silly when stated explicitly, but the power of frames is precisely that they shape our thinking without being stated explicitly.
There’s a deeper problem, though: Embedded in the idea of the scales is a picture of a process for arriving at sound decisions—which if the metaphor is sufficiently pervasive we may come to think of as the only method for making sound decisions. [...]
Obviously, we need to use shorthand terms like “privacy” and “security” to keep discussion manageable, but is it really especially illuminating to treat every proposed security measure as though its consequences can be reduced to quantity subtracted from an undifferentiated lump of privacy stuff, and a quantity added to a blob called security? The task of analysis is always aided when we can render heterogeneous interests more easily comparable by reducing them to some uniform measure, of course, but balance metaphors imply that we’ve already achieved this. This may be why so many legal opinions employing “balancing tests” feel so thin, and so many arguments about where to “strike the right balance” between competing values founder. The metaphor assumes a lot of analytic background work that hasn’t actually been done—and conceals the fact that it still needs to be.” http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/02/04/the-trouble-with-balance-metaphors/
The belt sander & the battle for privacy, a body hack: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+belt+sander+and+the+battle+for+privacy+a+body+hack
Mass Atrocity Prevention and Response Operations: “The new initiative aims to retask the military’s massive fleet of overhead-surveillance gear — drones, blimps, spy planes, satellites — to place watchful eyes on the perpetrators of mass atrocities. And that’s just the beginning. Jammers might stop the radio transmissions of aspiring genocidaires. Text and social media could alert the American forces about civilians at risk of being slaughtered.” http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/drones-vs-darfur/
Privacy of legal persons: “Does FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] give corporations the same personal privacy rights as natural born people?” http://epic.org/amicus/fccvatt/
“
If corporations must be treated as “persons” for the purpose of campaign contributions – as the Supreme Court mandated last year in the infamous Citizens United decision – why shouldn’t they also enjoy “personal privacy”? [...]
[...] we should ask about the social functions served by privacy protections. Yes weaker privacy protections make it easier to hold firms accountable, but that applies to individual humans as well. And if stronger privacy protects folks more against abuse by governments or others, that benefit should apply to firms as well. Yes people may just have a direct preference for privacy, but such preferences may be weak, and perhaps people working at a firm feel similarly about the privacy of their firm.
For most definition disputes, pretending to resolve it via conceptual analysis just isn’t very honest. It is more honest to argue about the desirability of various consequences of alternate social conventions.”
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/define-via-consequences.html
Cognitive biases&global risks&reduction of risks:
Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks: “All else being equal, not many people would prefer to destroy the world. Even faceless corporations, meddling governments, reckless scientists, and other agents of doom, require a world in which to achieve their goals of profit, order, tenure, or other villainies. If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.
The systematic experimental study of reproducible errors of human reasoning, and what these errors reveal about underlying mental processes, is known as the heuristics and biases program in cognitive psychology. This program has made discoveries highly relevant to assessors of global catastrophic risks. [...]” http://singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf
Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction: “In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives. We review the challenges to studying human extinction risks and, by way of example, estimate the cost effectiveness of preventing extinction-level asteroid impacts. [...]” http://www.paforge.com/files/articles/Reducing%20the%20Risk%20of%20Human%20Extinction.pdf
What Do IT Professionals Think About Surveillance? “A sceptic reader might be tempted to fire back with a “Who cares?” Surveillance exists and is becoming more widespread, independent of what the experts think.
In addition to presenting the findings of a recent research and interviews with IT professionals on such issues as surveillance and the handling of personal data and privacy in general, the author’s intention has been to frame an argument in favour of making IT professionals’ views on these matters count more in the formulation and implementation of the concept of modern surveillance systems.
Another interesting aspect of the topic is that, insofar as research on privacy is concerned, the IT community constitutes something of a white area and, therefore, our conclusions may enrich the discussions on the subject with some novel viewpoints, hopefully leading the emergence of new policies, strategies and areas of intervention for the benefit of the numerous stakeholders. The immediate motive for writing this paper has, however, been supplied by the BROAD project: a recent research that employed quantitative and qualitative methods alike, which was designed to test the views, the knowledge and the attitudes of IT professionals.
Finally, our paper also wishes to call attention to the importance of the empirical approach by pointing out that, in addition to the purely theoretical constructions, the direct study of reality could also help galvanize the speculative methods and engender further interactions between theory and practice.” http://pet-portal.eu/files/articles/2010/professionals/szekely_what_do_it_professionals_think_draft.pdf
Is reading wife’s e-mail a crime?: “A Rochester Hills man faces up to 5 years in prison — for reading his wife’s e-mail.
Oakland County prosecutors, relying on a Michigan statute typically used to prosecute crimes such as identity theft or stealing trade secrets, have charged Leon Walker, 33, with a felony after he logged onto a laptop in the home he shared with his wife, Clara Walker.
Using her password, he accessed her Gmail account and learned she was having an affair. He now is facing a Feb. 7 trial. She filed for divorce, which was finalized earlier this month.
Legal experts say it’s the first time the statute has been used in a domestic case, and it might be hard to prove [...]” http://www.freep.com/article/20101226/NEWS03/12260530/1011/NEWS09/&template=fullarticle
Video: Ron Paul’s Defense Of WikiLeaks On House Floor
Transcript [3' 30" - 5' 10"]:
Questions to consider:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
The Ethics of Wikileaking, Revisited “If Wikileaks had merely leaked information relating to morally questionable acts or illegalities, then I would have regarded such leaks as morally acceptable and even laudable. However, the folks at Wikileaks have crossed a moral line by publishing a cable providing a list of resources and assets “whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the United States.”” http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2389
Cf.: Wikijerks http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/12/wikijerks.php
Keeping WikiLeaks in Perspective http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/keeping-wikileaks-in-perspective/
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ‘will release poison pill of damaging secrets if killed or arrested’
Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers http://ftc.gov/os/2010/12/101201privacyreport.pdf
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