AUTHOR
Moira Carroll-Mayer, Bernd Carsten Stahl and Ben Fairweather

ABSTRACT

This paper urges discussion of the ethical issues to which the nanotechnologically enabled autonomous weapons policy gives rise. For the first time in history society is faced with the reality of digitised, nanotechnologically enabled autonomous weaponry, weaponry that without human intervention takes the decision to select and strike the target. The US and the UK under Joint Vision 2020 and Operation Watchkeeper respectively have as their goal the replacement of conventional weaponry with digitised largely autonomous weaponry, such transformation scheduled for completion some time within the next 15 years. Some autonomous weaponry is already on the field and more, for example self-replicating nanoassembler weaponry is anticipated. Little is known, outside the policy-making cadre, of these developments or of the means by which they are to be implemented. Accordingly the paper will discuss the concept of C41SR or the “system of systems” within which the autonomous weaponry will ultimately operate.

The advent of autonomous weaponry poses serious challenges for just war codes of conduct under which war has been conducted for centuries. The just war doctrine of command responsibility through which culpability for criminal actions on the field of war is punished demands the involvement of a human to whom responsibility can be ascribed. The autonomous weapons policy upon its current trajectory is irreconcilable with that doctrine. The concept of self-replicating nanoassembler weaponry, a form of autonomous weaponry avidly pursued in US DOD laboratories, also challenges the just war principles of proportionality and discrimination on the battlefield.

The research for this paper was undertaken employing critical research methodology. This decision was prompted by awareness that the topic, the ethical implications of the nanotechnological weapons policy implies a presence of tension between the interests of wider society and those of the hegemony. Critical research is rooted in a concern for ethics and the presence of social tension therefore the subject area of the paper provides the ideal milieu for critical research.

The research followed two distinct routes, one built upon a critical review of the literature emanating from military, political and scientific sources and the other upon the findings of a critical discourse analysis of the text of Joint Vision 2020.

The critical review of military, political and scientific literature facilitated a thorough investigation into the ethical issues to which the nanotechnological weapons policy gives rise. Importantly too the review enabled the research to establish whether and to what degree hegemonic bodies involved in the weapons policy address the ethical issues as perceived by those outside the policy making cadre.

The critical discourse analysis of Joint Vision 2020 assists understanding of how the nanotechnological weapons policy is forged, legitimised and made to seem unproblematic in society. The discourse analysis additionally rendered results substantiating allegations that the hegemony veils the development and ethical implications of nanotechnologically enabled autonomous weaponry from wider society

This paper penetrates the mist surrounding the nanotechnologically enabled autonomous weapons policy and paves the way for the confrontation of the most serious ethical dilemma to have arisen in the history of technological development.

AUTHOR
FS Grodzinsky, K Miller and M J. Wolf

ABSTRACT

Steganography is the art and science of placing information within a seemingly unrelated artifact in order to hide the information. The term steganography comes from the Greek meaning “covered writing.” The Greeks etched messages in wooden tablets and covered them with wax. Another Greek technique was to tattoo a shaved messenger’s head, let his hair grow back, then shave it again when he had traveled to the recipient of the message.

There are important connections between steganography and cryptography. However, the two activities are separate, and it is important to understand the technical details that distinguish these two techniques. A user of cryptography often assumes that attackers are aware of the message being transmitted and seeks to make the message unintelligible to the attackers. On the other hand, a user of steganography is (typically) intent on hiding even the existence of the intended message from possible attackers.

As an additional security measure, the steganographer can encrypt a message first and then hide it using steganography to further thwart an attacker; similarly, a message can be embedded using steganography and the resulting media can itself be encrypted. Thus, steganography is a technique for providing private and potentially anonymous communication. (This anonymity can extend to the sender, the receiver or both.)

This paper reviews historical uses of steganography and the impact that advances in information and communication technology have had on steganographic techniques. In particular, we note that computing has put steganography in the hands of just about everyone with a computer and an Internet connection. There are digital steganographic tools freely available on the Web.

The ability to hide messages using steganography has social and ethical implications similar to those of cryptography. Some governments have taken steps to ban the use of cryptography or certain types of cryptography. These bans are often in place to allow authorities to monitor communications; the security of people is thought to require restrictions on the privacy of communications. Currently, steganographic techniques can be used when encryption is prohibited.

Since steganography is considered part of the cyber warfare landscape we will consider whether restrictions on steganography similar to those already in place for encryption are warranted. We will analyze the ethical tradeoffs inherent in people having unfettered access to steganography. We will also consider legal, political, and economic questions surrounding the use and possible abuse of steganography.

While there may be much to be gained in terms of security (both cyber and physical), restricting the private use of steganography restricts free speech. We will argue that there is an important benefit to society when government and private business are not always aware of who is communicating with whom, and when the communication itself is closely held. This argument is even stronger when we realize that even though current steganographic techniques are good, they are not perfect.

Steganalysis, the detection of steganographic messages in electronic media can often detect the presence of steganographic messages. Thus, it is possible for outside parties (such as governments) with effort, to detect and possibly track down both the sender and receiver of steganographic messages. These detection techniques, if used fairly, would give law enforcement and security officials the means to fulfill their responsibilities under the watchful eye of the courts, while allowing citizens, as a rule, to communicate freely. Despite the strong public benefit of unfettered communication, there are also significant risks associated with an inability to detect such messages in the case of criminals, terrorists and those who threaten civil liberties.

While steganography has the property of allowing parties to communicate with greater privacy, it also can be used in a ways that can threaten civil liberties. For example, certain printer manufactures have designed certain color printers, copiers and fax machines to encode the serial number of their machine into every printed document it produces. Our analysis will include a discussion of companies that employ steganography to track documents and other artifacts, including their responsibilities to their customers, to society in general, and to the government.

In summary, the issue of digital steganography, its relation to cryptography, and the differences in how these two techniques are viewed and regulated, are all important intersections of technical details and human values. Our paper will examine these intersections.

REFERENCES

Cryptology: Classical Steganography. http://library.thinkquest.org/27993/crypto/steg/classic1.shtml?tqskip1=1 Accessed January 7, 2005.

Franz, Elke , and Schneidewind, Antje. (2004) Steganography II: Adaptive steganography based on dithering. Proceedings of the 2004 multimedia and security workshop on Multimedia and security, September 2004.

Schneier, Bruce. (2003) Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World. New York: Copernicus Books.

Tuohey, Jason.(2004) Government uses color laser printer technology to track documents PC World (November 22,2004) http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118664,00.asp Accessed January 3, 2005.

Wang Huaiqing, Wang ,Shuozhong. (2004) Cyber warfare: steganography vs. steganalysis Communications of the ACM, Volume 47 Issue 10, October 2004.

AUTHOR
Kenneth Einar Himma

ABSTRACT

Hackers believe that, at the very least, non-malicious intrusions are morally permissible and have offered a number of arguments purporting to justify such intrusions. Some hackers believe, for example, these intrusions are justified by consequentialist considerations because they result in an increase in humanity’s stock of knowledge about the relevant technologies and thereby promote the development of technologies that will help ultimately to make the Internet more secure. Some believe that any barriers to information are morally illegitimate and hence deserve no respect – including barriers that separate the information on one person’s computer from another person’s computer.

Recently, a number of writers, such as Mark Manion and Abby Goodrum, have begun to argue that attacks on government and corporate sites can be justified as a form of political activism – that is, as a form of “hacktivism.” The argument is roughly as follows. Since civil disobedience is morally justifiable as a protest against injustice, it is sometimes justifiable to commit digital intrusions as a means of protesting injustice. Insofar as it is permissible to stage a sit-in in a commercial or governmental building to protest, say, laws that violate human rights, it is permissible to intrude upon commercial or government networks to protest such laws. Thus, digital attacks that might otherwise be legally or morally objectionable are legally and morally permissible if they are politically-motivated acts of civil disobedience or hacktivism.

I argue that this increasingly influential line of reasoning is problematic on a couple of grounds. First, it wrongly presupposes that committing civil disobedience is morally permissible as a general matter of moral principle. While it is plausible to think that unlawful acts of civil disobedience should not, as a moral matter, be punished because of their potential contributions to political debate, it does not follow that those acts are themselves morally permissible. The first idea concerns what morality requires of the state; the second concerns what morality requires of individuals.

Considerations of political morality frequently preclude punishing acts that are morally wrong. No mainstream political theorist believes that it would be morally permissible for the state to punish persons for breaking unilateral promises (as opposed to an exchange of promises constituting a morally binding contract) – despite the fact that breaking any sort of promise is presumptively wrong. The moral standards that govern states and individuals frequently diverge; thus, for example, states may permissibly punish wrongdoing, but individuals may not. Thus, the argument for hacktivism rests on a fundamental mischaracterization of the underlying moral issues regarding civil disobedience.

Second, and more importantly, it is morally wrong, on ordinary views, to inflict significant harm of the sort that is typically caused by acts of digital civil disobedience on the strength of a view that is deeply contested in society. Notice that acts of digital civil disobedience typically result in causing significantly greater harm than sit-ins or other acts of non-digital civil disobedience. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that, for example, is intended to shut down a large commercial website can result in millions of dollars in losses to that site and potentially in losses of livelihoods; and it is just not clear, as an ethical matter, that the infliction of such harms on ordinary people can be justified as a form of free speech.

This is particularly problematic because civil disobedience is typically motivated by a moral view that is deeply contested in the culture; in many cases, the view motivating civil disobedience is one that is held by a small percentage of people in the culture. Because there is no reliable way to determine which side of the view is correct, there are moral limits on what sorts of harm or inconvenience can justifiably be inflicted on persons who are not morally responsible for the policy being protested. Hacking that can result in the loss of jobs is always problematic, but is especially so when grounded in views that have not been adequately defended – as is all-too-frequently the case.

I conclude that, at the very least, politically-motivated intrusions are morally permissible as long as they do not result in great harm to innocent persons. But this, however, seems to preclude the most common hacktivist strategies. For example, it seems to preclude digital acts contrived to deny persons access to web content because of the potential damage to both site owners and visitors; indeed, DDoS hacktivist attacks may fairly be presumed wrong because of effects on both the ultimate targets and the innocent agent machines used to stage the attacks. Similarly, it seems to preclude hacking into secure sites for the purpose of exposing sensitive information about firms or individuals.

In any event, the foregoing analysis suggests a framework for evaluating particular acts of digital protest. To fully assess the permissibility of any particular digital protest, the likely harms caused by a digital attack must be weighed against the relevant moral goods, which include the good that is achieved by politically motivated speech. However, the analysis must also take into account the extent to which the underlying political views that purport to justify the digital intrusion are reasonably contested.

AUTHOR
Professor Pelle Ehn

ABSTRACT

‘So the impact of UTOPIA is continuing to expand, and the idea that workers and their unions have an important role in the design of new technology is reaching a wider and wider audience. Today Scandinavia, tomorrow, perhaps, the rest of the world.’ This is a quote from an enthusiastic editorial published in MIT Technical Review in 1985. UTOPIA was one out of many projects starting in the 1970’s and shaping an approach to IT design, sometimes referred to as the ‘Scandinavian approach’. This development took place at the time when information technology stated to became ubiquitous in Scandinavian workplaces and paralleled major reforms in labour legislation concerning work environment and co-determination. Democracy at work, tools for skilled workers, and user participation in the design process, were key values espoused in shaping and in legitimising the approach. As the approach developed and got international recognition it became a major source of inspiration for and assimilated into the emerging general research field of participatory design.

When Thomas Moore in 1516 constructed the original vision of UTOPIA, he did so as a play of Greek words, making it mean both ‘a good place’ and a place that exists ‘no-where’. From this perspective I will reflect upon what became of the Scandinavian approach and its utopian designers. To what extent has UTOPIA become a ‘now-here’ as an existing reality? Have social and technical changes made the approach obsolete? Was it, in a market economy, possible to design sustainable information technology based on ‘soft’ values such as skills, democracy and participation? Were such values just espoused, legitimising the research approach but never part of real design in practice? And if the approach has survived, how does it look today – in research and in practice?

In reflecting upon these questions I will also put the Scandinavian approach and participatory design in a broader design historic perspective and look at the more general utopian design vision of moving towards a ‘digital Bauhaus’. This will also imply a reconsideration of the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis and what it in practice, beyond utopian dreams, may mean to carry out design as ‘anxious acts of political love’.

AUTHOR
Professor Jeroen van den Hoven

ABSTRACT

I will sketch a conception of ethics that has been referred to as Value Sensitive Design. Value Sensitive Design is a way of doing ethics that aims at making moral values part of technological design, research, development, and production. It works with the assumption that human values, norms, our ethics for short, can be imparted to the things we make and use. This approach greatly matters since information technology has become a constitutive technology, i.e. it partly constitutes the things to which it is applied. It shapes our practices, institutions, discourses in important ways. What health care, public administration, politics, education, science, transport and logistics will look like within twenty years from now will in important ways be determined by the ICT applications we decide to use in these domains. ICT will also shape the way we experience ourselves and others.

If our moral considerations about the user’s autonomy, talk of patient centred-ness and citizen centred-ness, his privacy, her security and safety are to be more than empty promises, these values will have to be expressed in the designs, architectures and specifications, but also in technical standards and norms and protocols, of the systems that play such an important role in these domains.

If our laws, politics and public policy about corporate governance, accountability and transparency are to be more than just cheap talk we have to make sure that they are incorporated in the systems that we cannot do without when it comes to the implementation of the relevant policies.

If we want our information technology – and the use that is made of it – to be just, fair, safe, environmentally friendly, transparent, we must see to it that our technology inherits our good intentions. Moreover we want them to be seen to have those properties, and we want to be able to demonstrate and attest to the fact that they possess these morally desirable features.

We want to be able to compare different architectures from these value perspectives and motivate political choices and investments from this perspective. And finally, and perhaps most importantly we want our technology to be designed in such a way that it will be possible for users to work with them while retaining their status as responsible human beings.

I argue that we find ourselves at an interesting historical junction, which is favourable to the development and practice of Value Sensitive Design. ICT has become more sensitive to moral values, and ethics has become more attentive to design issues.

AUTHOR
Sara Wilford

ABSTRACT

The prospect of a ‘wired’ world in terms of the delivery of government services is one that creates much debate. This paper examines the privacy implications for such a wide-ranging set of technologies. The work examines how privacy must be considered both prior to and during the implementation of any services that governments wish to provide and discusses how the growth of e-government has been very rapid and yet the success and extent of the services being provided has shown considerable variation of access and provision.

The paper begins by providing an examination of the nature and importance of privacy, providing a philosophical and sociological perspective on the need for privacy within modern western society. There is also a discussion of the issues of compliance and participation and how citizens balance their requirements for privacy with a desire to engage in the benefits offered by a consumer led society. This is followed by an analysis of what privacy means to individuals as a fundamental human right and considers the difficulty of defining privacy due to its subjective nature. The next section considers and analyses the issues of liberty and freedom and how privacy should be considered a key issue that may impact on the quality and quantity of liberty and freedom enjoyed by citizens in western democratic society. Further there is a consideration of the potential for increased surveillance creating a panoptic society of universal scrutiny of citizens. This may be justified as for the purposes of national security which although technologically possible and somewhat justifiable, may negatively impact on individual privacy, liberty and freedom. This means that there is a need to make the distinction between the ability to place society under surveillance and whether it is acceptable to do so.

The paper further focuses on the provision of e-government and examines how the provision of service may vary considerably between departments, governmental bodies and geographical regions. This encompasses discussion of the problems inherent in e-government systems such as access, provision, security and quality of information provided. Further, it is discussed how personal identification and verification needs to be in place to ensure the security of systems and appropriateness of access, but that the implications of such universal identification may adversely affect the civil liberties of citizens. This requires that there is a balance, which ensures that only that information needed for identification is gathered and it is not seen as an opportunity for the collection of other potentially useful data. Alternative uses of personal information gathered in this way may allow government organizations greater scope to utilize personal information for crime prevention or detection purposes thus impacting upon privacy and the privacy expectations of citizens. Recent proposals for Universal identification cards within the UK and USA are discussed in light of this issue. The paper further discusses public policy issues arising from the above debate, which considers the problems of ensuring transparency and accountability whilst also enabling privacy and security. This further discusses the need for built in protections that consider the needs of citizens rather than reactive, bolt on safeguards initialized after problems have occurred.

The paper considers current perceptions of privacy, awareness and importance by using case study examples. This highlights perceptions of privacy and the importance of informed consent to the use of personal information and public surveillance and which impacts on the provision of e-government services. An analysis of case studies in public and private sector organisations has indicated the importance of privacy to individuals and the differences in approach of the two sectors. Consideration of the findings of the case study research has enabled informed analysis of the potential impact of e-government on individuals particularly where citizens are able to conduct their affairs electronically. This analysis reveals whether online and other electronic resources being made available will bring about greater efficiency in the provision of public services and protection of citizens (presuming that such provision is used effectively by consumers) or will become a method of surveillance of the population leading to an erosion of privacy and liberty.

In conclusion, this paper reveals several key findings of the research undertaken and highlights how those findings can help to inform policy makers of the areas of importance to individuals. When undertaking e-government policies, awareness of the perceptions of those impacted by such decisions is shown to be a valuable tool in ensuring that policies reflect citizen needs and concerns as well as government desire for modernization of services. The need to consider the impact of e-government policies particularly where citizen participation is encouraged and expected, requires that not only the mechanics of such a system should be carefully designed, but that the bigger picture of civil liberties, and the importance of privacy to individuals, is seen as an integral part of e-government implementation.