Social Impacts of Technology
This article looks at a range of issues relating technology
to globalisation, community and power.
The article is primarily for your reflection. At the time of writing
many of the things we discuss here are just developing, and as such are not
extensively covered as yet in peer-reviewed journals which lag current affairs
by two or more years given the publication schedules of the journals. As such
the primary source of information here is the mainstream press (along with some
not-so-mainstream sources). The purpose
is to give an overview of these emerging issues using a very broad brush
approach. If you are really interested in one or more issues, then it is
recommended that you research these more thoroughly using additional resources
to those provided here. Please note, that while I personally strongly believe
that computer technology has a place in our society and that the internet in
particular provides a very empowering set of tools, there appears little doubt
that this technology (in particular) is associated with a range of unresolved
problems which seem to be primarily social and political in their nature.
At this point we will summarise the legal issues as they
relate to internet use based on Schneider (2007). Typically all businesses in a jurisdiction
need to follow a set of laws or face fines and possibly jail. As to what laws
they need to follow, traditionally these would be demarked by territorial
borders. As such, geographical boundaries logically coincide with changes in
culture and law and when crossing physical boundaries people receive notice
that one set of rules is being replaced with another as physically moving
geographically requires visas and checks. Thus people receive constructive
notice of legislative change when crossing international boundaries, even
if they are not informed specifically. Laws in the physical world normally only
apply to people who live within the jurisdiction of the respective governments
and legal systems (which may be inter-governmental). Thus setting up a business
requires an awareness of local laws and businesses that trade between countries
are required to become familiar with and to obey multiple sets of laws. Again
in the physical world, effects are determined by proximity. For example, businesses
with the same or similar names may cause problems if located in the same
suburb, but possibly not if they are in different cities or states.
The right to create and enforce laws in a physical area derives
from the mandate of those who are subject to them. Some cultures allow a high
degree of autonomy and authority while others have strict limits on government
authority.
Schneider (2007) argues that any business on the web is
automatically a global business. This creates a number of complications,
particularly for the small business that has maybe traditionally only operated
in a local area. Once they create a web-page for the convenience of their
customers, like it not, they are now a global business. Similarly, users of the
web may be purchasing from businesses whilst unaware of that business’s
physical location. For one thing, it is not always obvious that one is moving
across jurisdictional boundaries (i.e there is no physical constructive
notice). Also the fact that a person may be physically located in one
jurisdiction whilst participating in transactions in another can lead to
difficulties in determining which jurisdictional laws apply when there are
disputes. Courts may defend the laws of
other jurisdictions according to a principle of judicial comity (friendly
civility), but are reluctant to serve as forums for international disputes.
Often a factor in any disputes will depend on the agreement,
or contract, between the parties. Contracts consist of the following elements:
1. An
offer of a good or service at a specified price;
2. An
acceptance of that offer and its associated terms; and
3. Consideration,
the exchange.
An implied contract may exist if parties act as if a
contract exists, even if no contract has been written or signed. But we will see as we continue that contracts
are only one possible complication in relation to operating over multiple
jurisdictions. In fact, if the popular press is any measure then a large number
of disputes are based around issues of copyright and also intellectual property
(which also link to jurisdictional disputes).
Intellectual property includes all products of the human
mind. This includes protections offered by the issuing of patents and granting
of copyright. Copyright is granted by a government to the author or creator and
gives the holder the sole right to print, publish or sell the copyrighted work.
Copyright applies to books, music, artworks, recordings and architectural
drawings, choreographic works, product packaging and computer software.
Copyright does not include ideas, just their expression. Note though that under
copyright laws an arrangement of facts could be considered subject to
copyright, such as a directory of services that have been categorised. Considering
these implications of copyright you may ask the legitimate question as to
whether or not copyright is breached when you download a web page, as this
produces a copy of the web-page (which is subject to copyright) on the client
machine for you to view? However, under the law this is considered fair use of
the copyrighted material. If you were to redistribute it then that would
probably be another matter. In the USA fair use of copyrighted material (in the
USA) includes:
- Copying work for use in criticism;
- Comment and news reporting; and
- Teaching, scholarship or research.
Being so broad, this can be difficult to interpret and
courts play a key role here. If you make fair use of a work, you must include a
citation to the original work to avoid charges of plagiarism. One interesting and famous
case in relation to copyright involved Napster. Napster provided
a network that allowed millions of people to share music copied from CDs into
MP3 format. Recording companies considered this copyright violation on a grand
scale and sued Napster. Napster argued that it had only provided the
“machinery” used in the violations, much as VCR’s allow the copying of videos. Controversially the court found Napster was
guilty of vicarious copyright infringement, in other words, that it was capable
of supervising the infringing activity and that it profited from it.
Brafman and Beckstrom (2007) describe how the large record
labels approached internet swapping of music using their traditional approach
of bringing law suits against the companies associated with these activities.
Napster is a case in point here. However, Brafman and Beckstrom (2007) describe
how with the new technologies of the internet these strategies have not been
effective; that for all the law suits they are bringing against piracy, there
appears to be no material change in pirating.
Why is this? What has changed to make a time honoured business model
suddenly so vulnerable? (and you may well also ask: Why doesn’t the music
industry realise that this is not working? - Brafman and Beckstrom have an
explanation for that too, but we will not go into that here). Brafman and Beckstrom (2007) describe how the
music industry was successful against Napster because it wasn’t decentralised
and this allowed the labels to cripple the company’s central server and to
pursue the corporate management in the court system. Following Napster Niklas
Zennstrom released a peer-to-peer file sharing program called Kazaa. Within 12 months 250 million copies of the
program were downloaded and music swapping continued. Kazaa had no active server that could be
shutdown and Zennstrom used a range of strategies to minimise legal cases with
the large labels (and also physically avoided being handed subpoenas by men on
motorbikes working for the large labels).
When eventually the record labels sued Kazaa and its users, Zennstrom adopted
a nomadic strategy and moved the organisation to Vanuatu outside of the
jurisdiction of American and European legal systems. Meanwhile the labels pursued legal action against
Grokster and eDonkey. For every legal battle conducted by the labels new file
sharing software was being released, and it was becoming more and more
decentralised. Brafman and Beckstrom (2007) describe how this culminated with a
program called eMule. eMule is
completely decentralised. It is open-source, there is no owner to sue, no-one
even knows who started it. Brafman and Beckstrom (2007) quote Sam Yagan, head of
eDonkey: “eMule is a rogue network, its open-source, there’s no way for them to
pursue the entity eMule” (p. 25). Thus the record labels’ dogged determination
to hold on to a traditional centralised business model seemed only to
accelerate the development of the new decentralised model. Now it appears that, perhaps out of sheer
desperation, these organisations - being unable to sue the organisations that
provide the software - pursue individual users as scapegoats for their legal
ire. It seems that they do this in the hope
that these high profile cases will deter others in an apparent attempt to
create a regime of fear so as to maintain their market power. We will see some examples
of this in the following notes.
Case Studies
In the following sections we look at some case studies from
the media (mainstream and not so mainstream) to gain a broad-brush picture of
some of the issues associated with information and technology in recent years.
We begin with intellectual property law and copyright.
IP and Copyright
In addition to controversy around copyright, there is the
related concept of intellectual property.
A prominent case in this regard was the patenting by Amazon of a
One-click Online Purchasing System. Amazon sought, and received, patent rights for
this technology which has been criticised as being a trivial and obvious
technical approach to online purchasing.
Amazon used this patent to seek royalties from many other online
businesses, a most famous case being against Barnes and Noble booksellers, but
also issued a licence to Apple. The contentiousness of this patent has resulted
in many suggesting that a reform of the patent system is necessary, as the
justification for the patent system is to allow organisations a period of
exclusive rights to an idea so as to recover the costs of development and to
thus encourage investment in research and development (Engleman 2010). The argument is that the system is being
abused when trivial technologies, which required little development, are being
patented. Amazon’s patent was contested
in 2006 by a disgrunted New Zealand customer who found evidence of the
technology pre-existing the Amazon claim in 1997 (Engleman 2010). This lead to a review of the patent, but ultimately
resulted in only minor restrictions to its application (Crouch and Ratanen
2010).
Before we move on to look at examples of copyright
violation, it is recommended you watch the following video as an overview to
these topics:
The video raises a couple of issues. One is the one-sided
use of the law to defend the rights of large entertainment companies, which on
one hand make liberal use of the ‘creative commons’ yet on the other hand
ruthlessly pursue those who make use of their own work (which itself is often
based on our cultural capital). The other issue is the use of legal mechanisms
to ensure that the rights of these large organisations (as they see it) can be
enforced across the globe, regardless of changes in jurisdiction. The use of
trade agreements is the primary vehicle for this, and is perhaps considered
efficient, as they circumvent much parliamentary debate and many democratic
processes. These treaties are highly
contentious. In January 2012 protests were held in Poland following the UK and
21 other European Union member states signing an international copyright
agreement treaty called ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). The
protesters believed that this treaty could be used as a basis for censoring the
internet (a topic we will return to later) (Arthur 2012). Zappone (2012b)
describes how a US sponsored Trans-Pacific Partnership may allow US domiciled
businesses to deal with legal issues originating in Australia with legal
processes operating outside of Australia.
This same treaty was the subject of a petition signed by 30 Australian
organisations and sent to Federal Parliament on 14 March 2010 (AFTINET 2010). The petitioners argued that, among other
things, the treaty would allow US businesses to sue the Australian government
if Australian legislation, such as environmental protections or other public
interest laws, ‘harmed’ their investments here.
This issue of international jurisdictions extending beyond
or outside of a country no doubt came as a surprise for Hew Griffiths who must
be one of the first people in the modern world to find himself sent off to
stand trial in a country he had never visited for laws that apply only in that
country and not his home country, where the so-called offences were committed
(Nguyen 2007). Hew was extradited for
intellectual property crime; allegedly "cracking" copy-protected
software and media products and distributing them for free. At that time he was facing 10 years in jail
in Nevada USA. Needless to say, this extradition practice has been questioned;
NSW Chief Judge in Equity, Peter Young, is quoted as saying:
"International copyright violations are a great problem. However, there is
also the consideration that a country must protect its nationals from being
removed from their homeland to a foreign country merely because the commercial
interests of that foreign country are claimed to have been affected by the
person's behaviour in Australia and the foreign country can exercise influence
over Australia”. Peterson (2012) also questions this behaviour saying: “The US will go to the ends of the earth to
protect its big entertainment corporations […] The Americans have no qualms
about interfering in our domestic politics and local legal systems”. Peterson (2012) continues to describe how the
US entertainment industry (through the Motion Picture Association) targeted the
relatively small ISP iiNet to try and establish a binding common law precedent
that would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their
customers.
The latest move in this regard on
the Australian landscape appears to be the introduction of the Cybercrime bill
which is described by Bessant (2012) as follows:
“The Cybercrime Bill proposes to
expand the power of local police and ASIO to access Australian citizens'
digital communications, and to supply that data to foreign police and
intelligence agencies. It does this by tying Australia to the European Convention
on Cybercrime (2001) to which we recently became a signatory. The aim of that convention is to
create a common legal framework that eliminates ‘jurisdictional hurdles’ and
fosters co-operation for securing global protection against cybercrime. “
Censorship
Another issue commonly in the press is the perception of
attempts by governments to censor the internet.
China is famous for its “Great Firewall” that filters the information
Chinese citizens can access. Branigan (2010) begins her article with:
“When vicious inter-ethnic violence broke out in Urumqi last
year, Chinese authorities flooded the city with soldiers. But next came an
unexpected step: they cut off internet access across the vast north-western
region of Xinjiang. Controlling the information flow was as crucial as
controlling the streets, it seemed.”
Perhaps having witnessed the role of
communications media in uprisings as part of the Arab Spring (Pollock 2011)
governments are wary of online and mobile communications technology? These concerns may also be behind a proposal
by British Prime Minister David Cameron to restrict the use of services such as
Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger in the case of riots (Moses 2011). For
their part, internet companies and internet users are wary of attempts to
restrict access to the internet or other communications. Wikipedia protested against proposed
legislation in the US (refered to as SOPA or iPirate) aimed at online piracy.
Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales is quoted as saying: “we simply cannot ignore
the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and
abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the
world" (Rushe 2012). In Australia
censorship laws have been proposed aimed at blocking child-pornography and
other illegal sites. Critics argue that
the legislation, and the processes around the filtering, are open to be used
more broadly and may include legal sites also (Moses 2009).
If you are interested in learning more on the iPirate legislation
see the following short video:
Politics, Power and
Cyberwars
Wikileaks has played a role in the embarrassment of a number
of political figures and nations through its release of diplomatic cables which
were intended to be confidential (Associated Press 2010; Mann 2010). In 2010 Amazon
(which hosted Wikileaks) shutdown the Wikileaks servers, apparently at the
request of US government officials. PayPal and the credit card organisations
(Visa and MasterCard) also stopped processing funds directed towards Wikileaks:
and all this even though Wikileaks had not been convicted of breaking any laws
(Townsend, Duval smith & Halliday 2010; Saul 2010). As a result a minor cyberwar broke out whereby
a group of hackers referred to as ‘Anonymous’ started denial of service attacks
on the organisations that withdrew their services from Wikileaks bringing some
of them down (Townsend et al 2010; Moses 2010). This war has continued in relation to
crackdowns on internet piracy resulting in the 2012 arrest of some Anonymous
members (Associated Press, 2012).
However, cyberwar is not just conducted by disgruntled activist
citizens, it appears that sovereign states also engage in these activities.
Australian government sources suspect that Chinese intelligence agencies were
involved in a hacking scandal in which the computers of federal ministers,
including the Prime Minister, were accessed (Benson 2011). Benson (2011) states
that one MP said they regularly received informal warnings from security
agencies that "foreign" interests may be trying to access computers
and telephones. However it seems that use of the Internet by national security
agencies is not limited to interstate snooping, but also directed at citizens. Lévesque (2012) quotes Joseph Fitsanakis as
the co-author of a study into the use of the internet by intelligence agencies
as follows:
“We explain that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a host of
other social networking platforms are increasingly viewed by intelligence
agencies as invaluable channels of information
acquisition. We base our findings on three recent case studies, which we
believe highlight the intelligence function of social networking.”
However, Lévesque (2012) suggests the results of the study described
by Fitsanakis are misleading. She argues
that the study leads us to believe that social media is solely an intelligence
gathering tool, when other reports show that it is also used for the
creation of fake identities in support of covert operations, thus such
social media tools may also be used to spread propaganda or mis-information.
It seems that even this does not cover the complete extent
of cyber snooping. Millar (2010)
discusses claims that Australian government departments were interfering with
the opposition’s communications and email systems. But the most concerning
claim in relation to the manipulation of information in domestic politics is
the evidence that Fitrakis (2011) provides on how the electronic voting system
used in the US during the 2004 elections were manipulated to distort the voting
outcome so as to ensure a victory for President Bush. There are also claims by the Iranian
government that the US government has deliberately infected computers operated
by the Iranian government with the Stuxnet virus in an apparent attempt to
hamper the development and use of nuclear technologies (Dehghan 2012). This
virus has also allegedly affected the oil export industry in Iran as well as
the ability of everyday people to use fuel cards when filling vehicles.
Privacy and Personal
Vulnerability
The next two issues we cover in this lesson are those of online
privacy and personal vulnerability. Online privacy is a topic that most active
internet users have at least a passing familiarity with. Arthur (2012)
summarises some issues including, smart phone apps that copy all your contact
details (your friend’s names, emails and phone numbers), search engines that
track the sites you visit even if you are not using that search engine, and the
now familiar example of the supermarket identifying a teenage girl as pregnant
from her purchases. Add to this the ability for mobile devices to track your
physical movements over time and there seems to be little information about
yourself that is not available for information collection (Arthur 2011). However, a more sinister example of stores
using your data against you is offered by some cases where Ikea is accused of
illegal surveillance practices whereby they aimed to collect information on
unhappy shoppers who were engaged in litigation with the company, and also its
own employees (Chrisafis, 2012). In
fact, even if organisations do their best to try and not identify customers you
may not be protected. Chakrabortty
(2010) describes how data provided by AOL to researchers, which was
deliberately designed to protect the identity of individuals, was sufficient
for an average person to identify at least some of the people whose data had
been collected. The ability to secretly
record conversations using mobile technology is another area of concern - enough
to lead some into purchasing, and using,
illegal devices which jam mobile phone use in a small local area (Grubb, 2012).
Perhaps the recent evidence of illegal hacking by News corporation provides
evidence that such fears are somewhat justified (Sabbagh & O'Carroll 2012).
Even legal searches of online data may
be used to damage the reputations of people as in the case of an Australian
employed as a nanny by British PM David Cameron (Levy 2012). In this case, the article in the British
tabloid Daily Mail seemed to take advantage of the employment relationship to a
prominent British citizen to create sensationalised press. This perhaps can be explained by the overall
effect of the WWW on traditional print media business models as best explained elsewhere.
A final example for the collection and use of personal information
is provided in a Wall St Journal article by Efrati and Clark (2012) where they
discuss Google’s collecting of private data from Wi-Fi’s as they drove around
streets and took photos for the Google Street View project. This lead to the
company being fined for breaching privacy laws.
In relation to privacy there appears to be a kind of propaganda
war developing between proponents of personal privacy and states in regard to
the roll out of increasing powers of state surveillance (both legal and technical).
These include allegations that the FBI created and distributed key-stroke
recording devices to circumvent the need to obtain court orders to install spy
software on personal computers. It also seems that that may have been done with
collusion of at least some companies who produce and distribute virus checking
programs (Jackson 2001). Pressofortruth.tv released what appears to be a promotion video calling
for action against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing Protection Act (known as
CISPA) on April 27 2012. If you are interested a link is provided below (7.22
minutes):
Burghardt (2012) makes the following
statements in relation to his concerns:
“From driftnet
surveillance to data mining and link analysis, the secret state has weaponized
our data, "criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial," as
Cryptohippie famously warned.”
And:
“With the exponential growth of fiber optic and wireless
networks, the mass of data which can be ’mined’ for "actionable
intelligence," covering everything from eavesdropping on official enemies
to blanket surveillance of dissidents is now part of the landscape: no more
visible to the average citizen than ornamental shrubbery surrounding a strip
mall.”
The “Report on the Surveillance society” produced for the
British Information Commissioner in 2006 summarised a range of benefits and
risks of surveillance (mostly risks). One of their points was (Wood, 2006):
“.. most profoundly, all of today’s surveillance processes
and practices bespeak a world where we know we’re not really trusted.
Surveillance fosters suspicion. The
employer who installs keystroke monitors at workstations, or GPS devices in
service vehicles is saying that they do not trust their employees. The welfare
benefits administrator who seeks evidence of double-dipping or solicits
tip-offs on a possible ‘spouse-in-the-house’ is saying they do not trust their
clients. And when parents start to use webcams and GPS systems to check on
their teenagers’ activities, they are saying they don’t trust them either. Some
of this, you object, may seem like simple prudence. But how far can this go?
Social relationships depend on trust and permitting ourselves to undermine it
in this way seems like slow social suicide” (pg 3).
A BBC News article summarising the report’s concerns and the
Information Commissioner’s reaction is available here. There are also some who are concerned about the effects on
individuals in the modern internet environment with its culture of constant
communication. However, this appears to
be highly contentious, with strong views either way (Hughes, 2012). Perhaps
evidence of people’s concern regarding the use of computers by children is
provided by Richtel (2011) when he describes a school in Silicon Valley that
avoids computers and technology, even though many of the students’ parents work
in technology fields:
“While other schools in the region brag about their wired
classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look: blackboards with
colourful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopaedias, wooden desks filled with
workbooks and pencils.”
He quotes one parent as follows:
“At Google and all these places, we make technology as
brain-dead easy to use as possible. There's no reason why kids can't figure it
out when they get older.''
Society and Business
There are two remaining social
aspects we identify here. These, and
many others, will be looked at again in other posts. The first is the growing dependence individuals
and institutions have on ICT for the day to day running of our affairs. Examples of this vulnerability are provided
by recent bank ICT failures. One serious failure at the NAB prevented customers
from accessing their accounts for 2 days (and also appears to have not
processed transactions associated with those accounts during that time)
(Zappone, 2010). This is not an isolated incident, as CommBank ATMs also went down recently (Zappone 2012).
The final issue we look at here is in relation to the production of our high-tech gadgets
and tools in sovereign states that do not have very strong labour movements or
environmental protections. This has been
dominant in the mainstream press recently as a result of the efforts of Mike
Daisey to publicise problems at Foxconn, the large factory that manufactures
many of Apple’s products. This has lead
Apple to seek independent audits of conditions at the manufacturer (Garside,
2012).
References
Brafman, O & Beckstrom, A 2007, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organisations, Penguin.
Guardian, 29
March 2012, viewed 1 April 2012.
Mann, S 2010, ‘Clinton to test ties that bind after embarrassing leaks’, 2010, The Age, 1 Dec, viewed March 23 2012.
Sabbagh, D & O'Carroll, L 2012 ‘Sky News chief apologises to Leveson for previous denial of hacking’, The Guardian, 23 April, viewed 26 April 2012.
Schneider, G. 2007. Electronic Commerce. Thomson.
Zappone, C 2012b ‘US Business Seeks Australian Legal Loophole’, The Age, 2 March, Accessed 2 March 2012. (NB: This article was removed from The Age website a few hours after being posted.)
posted by Matthew Mitchell @ 7:18 PM
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