Collective Action, Democracy, Ethics, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Exploring the Ethics of Monitoring Online Extremism

by Ian Brown 23/03/2016

Exploring the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights.

by Ian Brown 23/03/2016

(Part 2 of 2) The Internet serves not only as a breeding ground for extremism, but also offers myriad data streams which potentially hold great value to law enforcement. The report by the OII’s Ian Brown and Josh Cowls for the VOX-Pol project: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material explores the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights. In the second of a two-part post, Josh Cowls and Ian Brown discuss the report with blog editor Bertie Vidgen. Read the first post. Ed: Josh, political science has long posed a distinction between public spaces and private ones. Yet it seems like many platforms on the Internet, such as Facebook, cannot really be categorised in such terms. If this correct, what does it mean for how we should police and govern the Internet? Josh: I think that is right—many online spaces are neither public nor private. This is also an issue for some for privacy legal frameworks (especially in the US). A lot of the covenants and agreements were written forty or fifty years ago, long before anyone had really thought about the Internet. That has now forced governments, societies and parliaments to adapt these existing rights and protocols for the online sphere. I think that we have some fairly clear laws about the use of human intelligence sources, and police law in the offline sphere. The interesting question is how we can take that online. How can the pre-existing standards, like the requirement that procedures are necessary and proportionate, or the ‘right to appeal’, be incorporated into online spaces? In some cases there are direct analogies. In other cases there needs to be some re-writing of the rule book to try figure out what we mean. And, of course, it is difficult because the internet itself is always changing! Ed: So…

Ethics, Governance & Security

Designing Internet technologies for the public good

by Ian Brown 08/10/2014

People are very often unaware of how much data is gathered about them—let alone the purposes for which it can be used.

by Ian Brown 08/10/2014

MEPs failed to support a Green call to protect Edward Snowden as a whistleblower, in order to allow him to give his testimony to the European Parliament in March. Image by greensefa.

Computers have developed enormously since the Second World War: alongside a rough doubling of computer power every two years, communications bandwidth and storage capacity have grown just as quickly. Computers can now store much more personal data, process it much faster, and rapidly share it across networks. Data is collected about us as we interact with digital technology, directly and via organisations. Many people volunteer data to social networking sites, and sensors—in smartphones, CCTV cameras, and “Internet of Things” objects—are making the physical world as trackable as the virtual. People are very often unaware of how much data is gathered about them—let alone the purposes for which it can be used. Also, most privacy risks are highly probabilistic, cumulative, and difficult to calculate. A student sharing a photo today might not be thinking about a future interview panel; or that the heart rate data shared from a fitness gadget might affect future decisions by insurance and financial services (Brown 2014). Rather than organisations waiting for something to go wrong, then spending large amounts of time and money trying (and often failing) to fix privacy problems, computer scientists have been developing methods for designing privacy directly into new technologies and systems (Spiekermann and Cranor 2009). One of the most important principles is data minimisation; that is, limiting the collection of personal data to that needed to provide a service—rather than storing everything that can be conveniently retrieved. This limits the impact of data losses and breaches, for example by corrupt staff with authorised access to data—a practice that the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (2006) has shown to be widespread. Privacy by design also protects against function creep (Gürses et al. 2011). When an organisation invests significant resources to collect personal data for one reason, it can be very tempting to use it for other purposes. While this is limited in the EU by data protection law, government agencies are in a…