AUTHOR

Serena Syme and L. Jean Camp
Kennedy School of Governmental
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138

ABSTRACT

The issues of governance of a network society are tightly bound by the creation of intellectual property rights in that society. Currently the widest range of intellectual property rights can be seen not in the law but in the various licenses, both used and proposed, in the software market. The creation of a market is the creation of a bundle of rights which together create property and further define the rules under which property-based transactions might apply. The fundamental thesis of this work is that the creation of property through licensing offers different view of the governance of the network society. Within our conclusions we identify how the concept of code licenses as a governance mechanism, first described by Stallman and popularized by Lessig, fits and fails when the particulars of code licenses are examined.

Thus this article frames the question of defining the network society by considering the various forms of governance currently applied to code: open code licensing, public domain code, and proprietary licenses. The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act is used as the exemplar for proprietary licenses. Open code licenses addressed here are the Gnu Public License, the lessor GPL, the artistic license, and the Mozilla license.

We conclude that the licenses are battles over the nature of the network society, and that each has its own hazards. Note that this fits the Stallman/Lessig hypothesis of code as law. We describe the concepts of openness: code availability, non-contamination, non-discrimination, non-specificity, distribution, and integrity. We examine how each license meets or conflicts with this concept of open.

We conclude that each of the dimensions of the open code license has a parallel in the dimension of governance. We argue that code availability is the suffrage of the electronic world. We further argue that derivation reflects privatization of the public commons, and thus disputes on when and if this is appropriate in the open code debates reflect similar larger debates in the policy community. We identify integrity as consumer protection regulation, Non-discrimination and non-specificity prevent the exclusion of an industry, organization, or group from the benefits of open code. This is the equivalent of equal protection under the law, or any ruling which argues that the system of rules should be blind in its application in order for a fair and just application. Yet by examining how these processes or rights might play out in a governance situation by how they function is the software market we identify failures in the argument that code is law.

We then discuss the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act. UCTIA is characterized by a shift in the concept of information property transactions from sales of property to use-specific licenses. UCITA is a fundamentally different model of governance than the open code models.

In fact, it takes as a given that none of the defining characteristics of open code would hold.

UCITA would implement two common practice which are currently under consideration by the courts; shrink-wrap licensing and click-wrap licensing. Click wrap licenses are the terms proposed in a dialogue box before installing software. Shrink-wrap licenses are the terms imposed in the printed contract in the box. Traditionally the terms of such licenses have often been held invalid because the customer cannot examine the license before purchasing the product.

Lastly, UCITA would make common and legal a (previously) rarely-used legal concept called self-help. Self-help allows a person who is owed a debt to collect on that debt in extreme cases by impounding the goods of the debtor. Electronic self-help allows the producer of software to disable the software on the machine of the customer or licenser if the producer believed the customer were violating the terms of the license.

Recall the core of this work is based on questioning the argument that code is law, examining its weaknesses and identifying its strengths. Recall again that if code is law the rules governing the creation of code become rules governing the creation of law. Thus we seek in history of governance parallels to the UCITA proposals and find them, remarkable enough, in the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago which describes the maturation of the Soviet legal system.

Again the parallels illustrate the strengths of the argument that code is law in that these parallels exist. And once again the parallels illustrate the weaknesses of the concept of code as law and licenses as governance. Again the core difference is the ability to opt out as long as alternatives exist. In effect the difference is the infinite mobility of individuals with respect to the choices of code jurisdiction. (Of course, we include in this work the arguments that UCITA would remove this mobility by effectively destroying open code.)

We identify both the hazards of forgetting that code can rule as well as the hazards of framing our policy with a metaphor; however interesting and powerful that metaphor may be.

AUTHOR

Paul Sturges and Ursula Iliffe
Loughborough University,
UK

ABSTRACT

Library record keeping has always produced significant files of personal data, most of which relate to the library’s users. The files have included records of membership and research interests; details of books borrowed and returned have cumulated in some library management systems; records of information requests and their outcomes have also been kept. The professional ethos of librarians, as expressed in codes such as the American Library Association’s Code of Professional Practice has been rooted in a very strong commitment to freedom of access to information. Thus the transactions between librarian and user have usually taken the form of an unquestioning provision of information by the former in response to the requests of the latter. Furthermore, research in more than one country has shown that this has been true regardless of whether the user’s requests have suggested some dangerous or anti-social motivation. It is because this has meant that users could usually consult and borrow whatever they wished, without interference or comment, that the content of reader records could be of genuine potential interest to police or intelligence agencies. For instance, Lenin’s British Museum Library user details were discovered not very long ago. Full documentation of his reading and that of Marx, a user of the Library over a much longer period, might well have been of interest to the agents of countries that saw their activities as threatening. Indeed, in totalitarian regimes there is ample evidence that library records have been used for surveillance of possible dissidents.

In the past this has seldom emerged as a problem in democratic countries for various reasons. The professional ethos of librarians has, like that of many other professions, placed a strong emphasis on respect for the confidentiality of client information. There is also considerable protection offered to the confidentiality of library personal data files by data protection legislation like the UK Data Protection Acts of 1984 and 1998. But perhaps most importantly, whilst user records were in paper files, retrieval of specific details was not always particularly easy. This poor retrieval potential tended to ensure that outside interest in library personal data files was often notional rather than real. However, today such files are increasingly created in digital form and these are so much more comprehensive and easy to access than the old paper records. Archiving of the reading records of library users is now a natural function of the computerized management systems that are in universal use. The ability to monitor email activity and use of the World Wide Web on terminals provided for public use in libraries is also part of system facilities. The same is true of a range of information finding activities by users, and librarians acting on their behalf, that necessarily involves electronic communication and recording of transactions. It is this improved potential access to personal data that makes the issue of possible outside interest in the content of libraries’ personal data files much more real. Additionally, today there is not only a notional official interest in reader records, but also a much more real possibility of commercial interest in the data. Library personal data files could certainly be used to identify possible consumers of particular products and services.

In the light of this radically changed situation, Resource (the UK Council on Museums Libraries and Archives) has provided substantial funding for a study of the issue by the Legal and Policy Research Group at Loughborough University’s Department of Information Science (July 2000 to December 2001). The study is, first of all, exploring librarians’ attitudes to the confidentiality of digital personal data files, and their administration of data protection law. For this purpose a wide-ranging survey has been undertaken in late 2000. Preliminary results from this, which will reveal the extent of libraries awareness of the issue, and preparedness to respond to approaches for access to data, will be reported in this paper. During 2001the project will also include surveys of user opinion and attitudes in software houses selling library management products, case studies of libraries from various different sectors, and exploration of practice in non-library sectors for comparative purposes. Progress on these aspects of the project will also be reported. Together these various elements are intended to build up a full picture of the state of attitudes and practices relating to privacy in the digital library. This will then be used as a basis for drawing up guidelines on appropriate policy development relating to personal data files in libraries.

AUTHOR

Lorraine J. Staehr
Department of Information Technology

Graeme J. Byrne
Department of Mathematics

La Trobe University,
Bendigo Australia

ABSTRACT

The importance of computer ethics education for the computing professional was recognised a decade ago by its inclusion in the computer science curriculum (Computing Curriculum, 1991). Since the publication in 1997 of the Australian Computer Society’s (ACS) body of knowledge for computing professionals (Underwood, 1997), a higher priority has been given to the teaching of computer ethics in Australia. The teaching of ethics in computing courses is now mandatory for professional level accreditation of a tertiary degree. The ACS core body of knowledge states that computing students should be “encouraged to develop a personal ethical framework”.

Two questions arise from this:

• How do we teach computer ethics in such a way as to encourage students to develop a personal ethical framework?
• How do we evaluate our teaching to see if this aim has been achieved?

An attempt to answer the first question was made in Staehr (1999).
This paper reports on a study that attempted to answer the second question. It is based on the work of Kohlberg who applied the developmental approach of Jean Piaget to the analysis of changes in moral reasoning. Kohlberg used surveys as a research methodology for assessing moral development. He presented subjects with moral dilemmas and asked them to evaluate the moral conflict. He found that moral growth begins early in life and proceeds in stages throughout adulthood. He defined three levels of moral development, with each level having two stages:

Level I: Preconventional Morality (age 4 – 10)
Stage 1: Obedience and Punishment Orientation
Stage 2: Instrumental-Relativist Orientation

Level II: Conventional Morality (age 10 – 13)
Stage 3:”Good Boy/Nice Girl” Orientation
Stage 4: Law and Order Orientation

Level III: Postconventional Morality (adolescence – adulthood)
Stage 5: Legalistic Orientation
Stage 6: Universal, Ethical Orientation.

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) of moral judgment is a questionnaire based on Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. Although the DIT has been used with a variety of professional/occupational groups to our knowledge the DIT has not been used to evaluate the teaching of computer ethics. The DIT was purchased from the Center for Ethical Development at the University of Minnesota and was administered to final year computing students at La Trobe University Bendigo. It presents respondents with six moral dilemma scenarios to evaluate. One group of students enrolled in the course Professional Environment was used as the experimental group, and the control group was drawn from computing students not enrolled in Professional Environment. The questionnaire was administered at the beginning and end of the semester to both groups with the aim of detecting any significant changes in moral development over the semester. As there was a computer ethics component within the Professional Environment course, the hypothesis was that students enrolled in this course would exhibit a greater increase in score for moral development at the end of the semester compared with those in the control group. The above experimental design is commonly called repeated measures, or a “before-and-after with a control group” design. Other factors such as gender were incorporated into the design.

For both the experimental and control groups a general increase in moral development was observed over the semester with gender being a non-significant factor. The experimental group performed significantly better than the control group, indicating a positive outcome due to the computer ethics teaching.

REFERENCES

Computing Curricula 1991. (1991). Report of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Curriculum Task Force, (Ed. Tucker, A.), ACM Press, New York, 1991.

Staehr, L. (1999) Teaching Ethics to Computing Students. Proceedings of the First AICE International Conference, Ed. Simpson, C.R., Melbourne, Australia, pp. 347-355. Full paper available online: http://www.aice.swin.edu.au/events/AICEC99/webabstracts.html#STAEHR.

Underwood, A. (1997). The ACS Core Body of Knowledge for Information Technology Professionals. The Australian Computer Society Incorporated.

AUTHOR
Richard Spinello

ABSTRACT

Our limited experience of the New Economy has given us a glimpse into the various market failures we can expect as electronic commerce becomes more widespread. The most typical market failure is an externality which involves additional costs borne by society that are not reflected in the price of the good whose production has generated those costs. The erosion of privacy or the transmission of spam would fall in this category.

In the virtual world as well as the physical one, market failures and imperfections are inevitable. But how should we address these failures? We can rely on the “invisible hand” of the market and wait for its self-correcting mechanism to take effect. The market will bring about the most efficient use of economic resources in the long run and this will tend to maximize the social good. However, while the market can effect some progress in eliminating imperfections, it is not the best forum for encouraging attentiveness to non-economic values such as privacy or free speech rights.

Or we can turn to the “hand of government,” relying on the force of law to secure values such as privacy or fair competition. We ask policy makers to intervene and correct the market failure or provide some means to thwart distorting behavior. While there are benefits to deferring to this “visible hand,” there are definite liabilities with this approach. There is always the risk that vested economic interests will capture policy makers. And the threat of regulatory arbitrage is greatly magnified in cyberspace. Also, we have repeatedly witnessed how difficult it is for laws to keep pace with the rapid and unpredictable evolution of technology.

There is a third alternative that is losing favor as consumers grow increasingly impatient with the opportunistic behavior of many e-commerce businesses. This is self-regulation. According to this model, the primary burden of regulating the ‘Net falls on its stakeholders, both organizations and individuals, along with those who develop the ‘Net’s code. What makes this self-regulation or “self-organization” of the Net feasible is technology. As Lessig (1999) reminds us, the most potent regulatory force in cyberspace is not the market or the law but code, i.e., the protocols and software programs that comprise the architecture of the Internet. According to Lessig, “the code is the law.” For example, users and organizations have at their disposal many software tools to control and regulate their environment: filters for unwanted speech, trusted systems for intellectual property protection, and technologies that make it easier to ascertain the privacy policies on web sites.

The first major argument of this paper will support the superiority of a decentralized approach to Internet regulation. We do not suggest that government regulations are always inappropriate, but that they should only be relied upon when absolutely necessary. We will contend that a decentralized rule-making scheme is preferable for several reasons. We use the Coase theorem to argue that self-regulation is usually the least costly solution, which keeps the overall harms to a minimum. We also demonstrate that this approach is consistent with the Net’s technology, which tends to defy centralized controls. Finally, we make the case that the individual and institutional autonomy which is preserved by this scheme represents an important countervailing power to government authority.

Lessig and others are quick to point out that decentralized rulemaking through code is fraught with risks and obstacles. Sometimes code developed by programmers such as filtering devices to block pornographic web sites masks a certain political agenda. Or code can be utilized to stifle legitimate forms of free expression and narrow one’s perspective. There is also the danger that commonly accepted, traditional values will be ignored in a code-based solution.

Obviously unguided self-regulation and self-organization of the Net is inadequate since it can solve some of these market failures but lead to other distortions, especially when stakeholders act only in accordance with their own rational self-interest. What we need is ethical self regulation whereby rational self interest, even when it is being used to deal with Internet externalities, is linked with respect for the needs and concerns of others and, above all, with respect for the common good of the Internet community.

How then is this ethical self-regulation to be achieved? Can it be implemented in a way that is not disruptive or counterproductive? We must first appreciate that there are three key issues involved in a decentralized scheme of regulation. First, users and organizations in cyberspace must exercise proper self-restraint. They must abide by commonly accepted moral principles and respect the needs and interests of others even when the law is ambiguous.

On a second level, Internet stakeholders must prudently regulate or order their environments. They must seek to avoid or at least minimize the collateral damage that can sometimes accompany code-based solutions designed to handle externalities (such as filtering pornography or blocking out junk e-mail.) This will often involve choosing the right software and implementing it responsibly.

Finally, software developers, ISP’s, and others who facilitate Internet access have a special obligation. They write the code that regulates the Net and they set the rules of access. They are shaping the Internet’s future architecture and are obligated to do so in a way that is attentive to core moral values. If self-regulation is to work effectively they must demonstrate the moral competence to develop code as carefully as lawmakers develop laws.

While the issue of self-restraint is important it will not be our focus. Instead we will dwell on the second and third issues, and specifically on how the use of code as law complicates but enhances the opportunity for effective self-regulation. We propose some general “meta-principles” that suggest some parameters for how users should behave when ordering their environment and how developers should behave when writing the Net’s code. The final paper will expand upon each of these principles in some detail:

• Code should be as open and transparent as possible so that the user’s autonomy and capacity for informed consent is fully respected.
• Where there is more than one code-based solution to a given social problem, users should choose whichever solution minimizes collateral damage.
• Code should be written so that it preserves traditional social and moral values such as “fair use” of copyrighted material.
• Whenever feasible, regulations should be imposed downstream rather than upstream, i.e., at the level of the individual or in some cases the organization but preferably not at the level of ISP or the state.
• Opportunity should be provided for independent review and dialogue for pieces of code that appear to have some regulatory force
• There must be reasonable proportionality between the harm that is being corrected and the code-based solution that corrects this harm.

Thus, our purpose in this paper is twofold — it will defend a decentralized approach to regulating the Internet, and it will provide some general guidelines for how this model of self-regulation can be realistically accomplished within the bounds of ethical probity.

REFERENCES

Lessig, L. (1999) Code and other laws of cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.

AUTHOR

Martha M. Smith
International Center for Information Ethics
& The Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
Brookville,
New York,USA

ABSTRACT

Bioinfoethics: A field of applied ethics concerned with biomedical, living systems in relation to the information systems that enable or restrict the transfer (creation, organization, dissemination, evaluation, and use) of data, information, and knowledge between those living systems and individuals or institutions in the global society.

Scientific American recently called the field of bioinformatics the new gold rush because genetics without bioinformatics has no future. (Scientific American, 7/2000) If so, then in the coming years, bioinfoethics may not be far behind. The ethical questions are already in the news.

• Who should own the Human Genome or have access to data about it?
• Does the promise of new drug therapies justify exclusive proprietary access to genetic information?
• Should genetic testing be required for jobs or parenthood?
• Shall we as a society constrain cloning and cloning research or is cloning an appropriate reproductive technology?
• Do the claims of public safety trump concerns for personal privacy in mandating DNA databanks?
• Is iris identification or body scanning a necessary security technology–in sensitive workplaces, in public spaces?
• Should brain fingerprinting be used to prosecute the guilty and exonerate the innocent?

Looking back almost fifty years from the perspective of 2000, after Dolly the sheep and the rapid conquest of the human genome, one could argue that Joseph Fletcher in 1954, signaled the beginnings of bioinfoethics with his book, Morals and medicine: The moral problems of: The patient’s right to know the truth, contraception, artificial insemination, sterilization, euthanasia. Fletcher asserted that the patient has the right to know the truth about a terminal illness or about reproductive choices. Despite its lack of constitutional status, the right to know has been more and more morally compelling in the last few decades. With the power to have relevant information and use that information in making decisions, the patient/consumer shares a responsibility that was once held exclusively by the physician. The right to know has entered into public policy with provisions for informed consent and advanced directives. Beyond medicine, the public’s right to know is often affirmed. For example, the environmental movement, typified in the annual celebration of Earth Day, grew from public concern with threats to clear air, water, soil and access to research data, sometimes from whistle-blowers, to build a case for change in government and industry practices. The Internet has fostered the notion that everyone has the right to know everything all the time and even to have free music and other copyrighted materials. While 24/7 access to all of the world’s knowledge is not very realistic, still the expectation of instant information gratification has never been higher.

Many of the issues in medical ethics and environmental ethics that were once controversial now seem almost tame compared to the clashes of values in genetics and bioinformatics. And the stakes are high as matters of profit, life, insurance, and death collide. The field of applied ethics (medical ethics, environmental ethics, information and computer ethics, mass media ethics, cyberethics, and business ethics) has a rich literature and a distinguished history of analysis and insight to use in engaging these new challenges.

When biology and medicine meet informatics (information systems management, statistics, computer science) and they meet on the Internet, then new complexities require renewed reflection. The curriculum proposed will use the concepts of Identity, Knowledge, and Community to analyze current issues in light of philosophical and ethical traditions. The needs of undergraduate, professional, and graduate students, both technical and non-technical, will be addressed. A classroom-based, web-based, or combination of setting will be considered as well as the wealth of print, electronic, and multi-media resources available to enrich teaching and learning. Below is a sampling of books, papers, and web sites that would be useful in preparation.

Bynum, Terrell W. and Rogerson, Simon. (Eds.) (1996). Global information ethics: Selected Papers from ETHICOMP95. Science and Engineering Ethics (UK). 1996 2:129-256.

Capurro, Rafael. 1996. Information technology and technologies of the self, Journal of Information Ethics 5(2):19-28.

Fletcher, Joseph. (1988). The ethics of genetic control: Ending reproductive roulette. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Floridi, Lucas. (1999): Information ethics: On the philosophical foundation of computer ethics. http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/ie.htm.

International Center for Information Ethics. http://www.infoethics.net

Johnson, Deborah G. (1994). Computer ethics. (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Jonas, Hans. (1966). The phenomenon of life: Toward a philosophical biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jonas, Hans. (1984). The imperative of responsibility: In search of an ethics for a technological age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mason, Richard, Mason, Florence, and Culnan, Mary. (1995). The ethics of information management. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Mitcham, Carl. (1995). Computers, information and ethics: A review of issues and literature. Science and Engineering Ethics, 1 (2):113-132.

Nash, R. F. (1989). The rights of nature: A history of environmental ethics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Smith, Martha M. (1997). Information ethics. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), Vol. 32, 1997 (pp. 339-366). Medford, NJ: Information Today for the American Society for Information Science (ASIS).

Finally, some possible directions for the research agenda of bioinfoethics will be suggested including consideration of global ethical traditions and the role of international non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) such as UNESCO (United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization) and documents such as the Universal Declaration of Genetic Rights (http://www.unesco.org ).

Smith, Martha M. (1997). “Information Ethics.” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), Vol. 32, 1997 (pp. 339-366). Medford, NJ: Information Today for the American Society for Information Science (ASIS).

UNESCO. http://www.unesco.org/webworld/infoethics_2/eng/proceedings.htm -: Observatory on the Information Society http://www.unesco.org/webworld/observatory/index.shtml – (1999-2000): World Communication and Information Report 1999-2000 http://www.unesco.org/webworld/wcir/en/

UNESCO. Observatory on the Information Society. URL: http://www.unesco.org/webworld/observatory/../index.html.

UNESCO. Webworld Infoethics. URL: http://www.unesco.org/webworld/infoethics/infoethics.htm.

United Nations General Assembly. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Web Sites

Article 19. XIX. Article 19. The International Centre Against Censorship.

Capurro, Rafael. Homepage in English.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

UNESCO. Observatory on the Information Society

UNESCO. Webworld. Infoethics.

AUTHOR
Maciej Smiatacz

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION.
During the last decade the progress in the field of computer vision has become incredibly fast. Five years ago the algorithms of pattern recognition and picture processing seemed too complex to have real-world applications. Today even personal computers are fast enough to perform these tasks effectively and the first commercial computer vision systems appeared. Although they may help to combat fraud, reduce crime or speed the passage of people at airports some attention must be given to the problem of “erosion of privacy” that can be caused by this technology.

BIOMETRICS.
A biometric system is a pattern recognition system that establishes the authenticity of a specific physiological or behavioral characteristic possessed by a user. The most known example of biometrics is the fingerprint recognition but from the computer vision point of view face recognition is far more interesting. Of course it would be nice to replace the PINs, passwords and social security numbers with the algorithms that are able to recognise the users by simply looking at them but there are some specific problems. First, the face recognition system must use a large database of electronic photos of the users. This data can be easily transferred or secretly processed, for example the picture acquired by some tourist information system at the airport could be used to get the access to some confidential files. Moreover, one can never be sure that the system is not trying to classify his race or to determine his psychological characteristics by analysing his face expressions.

Then there is the question of reliability. Although researchers report recognition rates of nearly 100% these results are often obtained with non-realistic data sets. Typical accuracy of the best face recognition systems is only 50% if the photographs were taken one year before the test and PC Magazine reported that one of the commercial products can be fooled if you print a photograph of somebody’s face and then place it in front of the camera. The performance of a verification system is characterised by two error statistics: false-eject rate and false-alarm rate. A false reject occurs when a system rejects a valid identity; a false alarm occurs when a system incorrectly accepts an identity. This means that the face recognition system designers always must compromise: for a bank ATM system it is more important to avoid irritating legitimate customers while for systems that provide access to a secure area the false-alarm rate must be as low as possible. However, this is not the technology that we can fully trust.

Three projects related to biometrics are currently under way in Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics of Technical University of Gdansk, some of them in co-operation with Belarusian Academy of Sciences (BAS). The goal of the first project is to create a universal framework that could be used to perform exhaustive tests of different face recognition algorithms. The next one is going to provide an implementation of active shape models technique and several others methods that could be helpful in automatic face localisation and tracking. The BAS project, on the other hand, is concentrating on selection of invariant features of the human face that would make the recognition possible during entire lifetime. Although the first stage of all three projects concentrates on technical aspects of human face biometrics and the respective models and algorithms, the second stage about to begin will have to resolve the visual data safety problems to secure privacy and make operations of our systems more trustful to the users.

MOTION TRACKING AND IMAGE UNDERSTANDING.
In recent years a lot of research has been done on automatic object location and tracking, gesture recognition and analysis of motion pictures in general. These problems are extremely complex but as the computers get more and more powerful we may soon realise that there are systems that completely understand our actions. Again it can help us to prevent terrorist attacks or simply to catch the thieves at a supermarket but, on the other hand, the Orwell’s vision of people living under permanent control has never been closer to reality. First automatic-surveillance systems based on computer vision have already appeared and possibly they are going to be more effective than human guards are but they can hardly be as intelligent as human beings. This means they will fail in atypical situations or it will be easy to cheat them by providing some unusual signals that would make the system work in conditions than were not taken into account during the design process.

COMPUTER VISION AND INTERNET.
The probability that the biometric data will be misused by government institutions is fairly low but we must not forget that this technology will soon be available to everybody. A simple web cam costs less than 100$ and there are face recognition programs costing about 200$. Everybody can place a web cam outside a building and anyone can use the pictures transmitted from it. From the technical point of view it is quite easy to run a face recognition program that continuously analyses the pictures from remote web cam and inserts a log entry every time particular person appears in some place.

CONLUSION.
The ethical problems of computer vision have already been noticed by International Biometric Industry Association that prepared several standards and recommendations for system manufacturers. Probably the new technology will also require some legislative reforms. Anyway, it would be unwise to avoid the computer vision development for the fear that it would be used unfairly.