Suchergebnisse

"People increasingly live online, sharing publicly what might have once seemed private, but at the same time are enraged by extremes of government surveillance and the corresponding invasion into our private lives. In this enlightening work, Adam Henschke re-examines privacy and property in the age of surveillance in order to understand not only the importance of these social conventions, but also their moral relevance. By analyzing identity and information, and presenting a case for a relation between the two, he explains the moral importance of virtual identities and offers an ethically robust solution to design surveillance technologies. This book should be read by anyone interested in surveillance technology, new information technology more generally, and social concepts like privacy and property"--

AbstractIt is a long-held belief that states must retain the monopoly over political violence in order to be states, and to survive. However, there are recent criticisms of this view forcing us to consider not just the state's use of political violence but the very nature of the state. Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings's Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified? argues that it cannot. Ned Dobos's Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine raises a series of arguments against states having standing militaries, and Alex Vitale's The End of Policing similarly raises a series of arguments against the institution of the police. In this review essay, I suggest that these arguments all force us to revisit the very nature of the state. There are concerns about simply abolishing these institutions of political violence, but we can indeed conceive of states without the monopoly on violence.

AbstractThe Internet of Things (IoT) is, in part, an information handling system that can remove humans from the information handling process. The particular problem explored is how we are to understand privacy when considering informational systems that handle personal information in ways that impact people's lives when there is no human operator in direct contact with that personal information. I argue that these new technologies need to take concepts like privacy into account, but also, that we ought also to take these technologies into account to reconsider and perhaps reconceptualise privacy. This paper argues that while an inhuman system like the IoT does not necessarily violate theinterpersonalprivacy of people, if the IoT is used as part of a state surveillance program, apoliticalnotion of privacy may be violated.

AbstractThe ethics of whistleblowing are complex and challenging. On the one hand, there are a strong set of moral reasons why someone ought to blow the whistle when he or she learns of wrongdoing. On the other hand, such actions typically come at a significant cost to the whistleblower and may not bring about any significant change. Both aspects prompt us to ask, why would I be a whistleblower? Emanuela Ceva and Michele Bocchiola's Is Whistleblowing a Duty? answers that question by arguing that one has an organizational duty to blow the whistle. Kate Kenny's Whistleblowing: Toward a New Theory reframes the question, showing how hard it has been for members of the international financial industry to blow the whistle and bring about any effective change to that industry. In this review essay, I suggest that analyses of whistleblowing need to take into account evolving technologies, the importance of loyalty, and special contexts such as whistleblowing in the national security sector.

A review essay covering a book by Fritz Allhoff, Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture: A Philosophical Analysis (2012).

This book draws from the use of modern surveillance technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore a set of issues and challenges facing decision-makers and designers in times of emergency: how do we respond to emergencies in ways that are both consistent with democratic and community principles, and that are ethically justifiable?.

In recent years, international attention has been turned to the ways that states use disinformation to further their own political ends. Propaganda, information conflict and active measures have long been a tool of statecraft, but the parallel development of information and communication technologies with increased levels of internal discord and social tension within states have made such disinformation campaigns both more effective and more worrying. This paper provides a brief history of Soviet "active measures", before examining the role of Russian disinformation and cognitive warfare in Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The examination of this topic is not solely confined to a description of the methods used; it also highlights some of the ethical issues involved in Russia's use of cognitive warfare and its heavy reliance on disinformation. Whereas information warfare focuses on controlling the flow of information, cognitive warfare instead has a more subtle yet potentially more damaging goal of shaping not simply what people think, but how they think and how they react to information. One of the significant features of the current conflict in Ukraine is the role that disinformation is playing in both driving and describing the conflict, and this paper explores the history and ethical implications of modern cognitive warfare, particularly in relation to the current conflict in Ukraine.

Transparency is important for liberal democracies; however, the value of transparency is difficult to articulate. In this article we articulate transparency as an instrumental value for providing what we call ensurance and assurance to liberal democratic citizens. Ensurance refers to the property of liberal democracies which prevents it from sliding into authoritarianism and assurance is the property whereby citizens are assured that ensurance exists. Looking at the rise of bulk data collection and use afforded by information communication technologies, this paper focuses on the way that technologies disrupt relations between the state and its citizens, and suggests Value Sensitive Design as a methodology to protect key aspects of liberal democracies. Bulk data collection makes the achieving of ensurance and assurance more difficult due to two types of opacity which arise as a result of the practice: technical opacity-the difficulty for citizens to understand the technology behind bulk data collection; and, algorithmic opacity-opacity which results from properties inherent to algorithms which guide the collection and processing of bulk data. Design requirements will be suggested to respond to the disruptions caused by ICTs between liberal democracies and their citizens which threaten the necessary value for liberal democracies of representativeness.

Given recognition of widespreadstate sponsored surveillance programs, areliberal democraciesdescending into an Orwellianauthoritarian nightmare? The realities of the modern surveillance state instead suggest ourworries ought to be about Kafkaesquebureaucratic black holes. In this paper we suggest thatauthoritarianism can be avoidedbyliberal democracies if they adhere to processes ofensurance and assurance. Moreover, we argue thatboth of these attributes are instrumentally enabled by transparency.