Leslie Harris, CEO and president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, wrote of the “dangers lurking in so-called data retention laws” in a story for the Huffington Post on July 13.
She quotes Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), chairman of the House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee, who stated bluntly that “this bill is bad policy and I will do my best to kill it.” Sensenbrenner attacked the bill for proposing blatant intrusions and violations of personal privacy, suggesting only that the bill “be defeated and put in the dustbin of history.”
Harris questions the practicality in legislation forcing data retention when one of the biggest concerns in current thought is privacy, and more so in the face of a call to limit even further the capacity for any entity to retain any data whatsoever on web surfers.
What about the trolls?
According to ABC News, lawsuits involving “plaintiffs [suing] John and Jane Does who have allegedly defamed them” abound. The question is, defamed how? Judges must increasingly decide the answer to that question and determine when or what violations happen, be it posting derogatory comments on a deceased person’s Facebook page to anonymously posting videos of a person without his or her permission.
Even tougher for judicators is deciding when someone’s anonymity is no longer valid through the law. Such unclear limitations for what constitutes the revealing of personal identities because of their actions online create discontent.
Some organizations seek to end the problem of trolling, posting intentionally derogatory or counterintuitive comments, by simply removing the ability for their users to be anonymous, integrating third-party comment or log-in platforms like Facebook.
On the legal front, congress has proposed other bills that would require users to submit greater amounts of personal information with which congressmen say would ironically be used to protect minors on the internet.
Opponents argue that such laws would inhibit free speech, preventing people from exhibiting their opinions in a purely conversational forum without the possibility of receiving value judgments based on detailed personal information as specific as race, background, or age.
As Harris puts it, “Anonymity allows speakers to express unpopular and dissenting views without fear of retribution, and permits individuals to participate in different online communities on their own terms.”
Separating the terrorists from the activists
Interestingly enough, a certain group of numerous and widespread common internet users has been generating considerable amounts of recent news.
Through internet subversion and certainly bothersome web attacks, they advocate fully uncensored internet access and freedom of speech amidst what they consider internet tyranny and information suppression. This group masquerades in digital personas reminiscent of the Guy Fawkes mask-wearing, sword-twirling character ‘V’ from the Alan Moore comic book series, “V For Vendetta”. The group, fighting for the right to permanent and eternal anonymity, is appropriately named the Anonymous.
The group itself is not an organization in the sense that it does not have a hierarchy or membership structure. Instead, it would more accurately be depicted as a vast collection of random people with similar yet varying goals who have come together, rather anonymously, to execute activities to further their efforts in order to reach their goals.
Any internet user could quite literally join anonymous at any time and leave just as easily. It is quite possible that a vast majority of its members are not involved in the group’s well-publicized illegal activities.
Unfortunately for their reputation, the community from which they spawned, the chan-imageboard collectives, is a den of the largest quantity of the internet’s most proficient trolls.
Thus births the question, are the ones defending anonymity and the realm of the trolls really just trolls themselves?
Next...Consumer Privacy
Consumer Privacy
Consumer privacy is one form of anonymity that is an incredibly serious topic of debate that continues to be problematic for lawmakers.
Well-known instances of trouble included uproars about companies like Facebook reserving the right to use, sell, and share user personal information with anyone they want at any time without being required to inform the actual user of any such doing.
Such policies are possible because of a lack of any comprehensive laws protecting consumer privacy, instead being governed by a few “sector specific” laws enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, according to an article published on Ars Technica.
In a Wall Street Journal investigation performed last year, journalists discovered that some websites secretly install over a hundred different pieces of tracking technology onto a person’s computer with just one visit.
This technology is able to track keystrokes and all other webpages visited thereafter, seeing what a user’s interests are, what the user types in comments or feedback to whatever services or topics they’re voicing an opinion on, and even personal information stored in private areas like location, income, and medical conditions.
This information is then all compiled and sold in large packages to advertisers or other unknown entities, to be used however they see fit.
Some companies are even beginning to develop tools that use information from social networking sites.
New Laws
Harris cites failures of data retention directives implemented in 2006 in the European Union as proof that those laws do not work. “At least three national courts have now struck down their respective national implementations of the Directive on constitutional or human rights grounds, making the future of the directive uncertain,” says Harris.
Instead, a solution would be to revise existing legislation. “Before even considering any kind of data retention law, we need to update current laws that deal with our data, specifically the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to provide more protection for digital data from government access,” says Harris. The ECPA was legislation passed in 1986 which laid out rules and standards supervising the access of electronic communications by law enforcement.
Harris and other members of Digital Due Process, a coalition of numerous digital and media companies and rights foundations, believe that updating the ECPA would provide for sufficient protection and guidelines by which authorities could force certain internet users to take legal responsibility for their actions.
Legislators meanwhile are attempting to determine how to develop new privacy laws for internet companies, and whether or not those laws should increase or decrease the government’s ability to monitor general web activity and internet usage.
If there is to be any new law, many observers say that this law should be designed only to comprehensively protect consumer privacy and personal information from companies or other entities who would seek to exploit them, not force even more transparency out of them.
Back in April, senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights with the end goal of providing these kinds of measures. Congressmen in the House of Representatives have also introduced similar bills.
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