NII, Competing Visions
Viewpoint:
Issue: Regulation
The EFF sees essentially three wide areas of concern in the area of regulation: personal, corporate and government.
Or, jump down this page to issues of censorship | safety | privacy | piracy | prevention | penalties | ownership.
The EFF believes that it is imperative that the rights of individuals be protected in the NII. This is especially true in the area of education. Discourse can be extremely blunted without protection of personal freedoms. These freedoms include the right of inquiry, the right of access to any and all sources of information, and the right to express opinions.
The EFF also sees that deregulation of corporations on the NII encompasses several important areas. Inter-corporate commerce needs to be regulated in the sense that data bases and other sources of information that are highly proprietary, such as trade secrets, designs and customer lists, be protected one from another. Further, they need to be protected from third-party utilization or a gray market or black market of information and data processing will flourish. Finally, corporate access to personal utilization records within a customer's account also needs thorough care and constant attention in terms of such issues as availability of this information for resale or to governments. Recent cases, with shipping agencies such as Federal Express and credit card companies such as American Express, have shown that as part of a private law suit, a search for information can be served upon the corporation. In these cases, the corporations' responses were overwhelming in terms of the amount of information that they have shared with plaintiffs and potentially, government investigators. The EFF believes that there must be regulations to govern access to and dispersal of this type of information. There must also be regulations that ensure that commerce can be conducted between individuals and corporations, between corporations and corporations, and between corporations and governments that entails safe, reasonable and consistent activity.
For the EFF, perhaps one of the most troubling areas in regulation is government. Questions such as span of control, extent of invasion abilities, plus police powers are extremely important to consider. However, without a government role of some sort, there is no third-party clearing house for such issues as technical standards. Therefore, the issue becomes, where will the regulation be housed if not in the government? The EFF believes that minimal government regulation is important, but the operative word is "minimal." The government's attitude for its own involvement is substantially different and is manifested in such areas as "Framework for NII Services".
From the EFF's point of view there should be virtually no censorship built in as a policy for the NII. This is especially relevant in the area of education. What is obscene in one area of the country is acceptable in another. What "local " community standards should apply? Further, the issues of academic freedom and freedom of access to information are essential to the educational process, especially at higher levels. The essential developments in Washington vis a vis the Exon "Censorship" bill (S.314/H.R. 1004) are worrisome, even alarming. Attaching this Communications Decency Act to the Telecomm Reform Bill will change the net irreparably. The ACLU and others along with the EFF are vehemently opposed. Information and suggested actions are available at The American Civil Liberties Union.
Irrespective of the lack of censorship, the EFF believes that there are safety issues built into the infrastructure, especially from an educational point of view. Perhaps one of the most subtle yet most important of the safety issues is accuracy of information and publishing of dis-information. These range from distribution of potentially hazardous information, such as details on how to make a bomb, to distribution of slanderous information. It also includes more subtle areas, such as premature distribution of data from chemistry, physics and other academic inquiries that can result in duplication of experiments that would create false or even dangerous results. Even now, there are instances of spiders and robots released on the network that cripple servers. It is only a matter of time until there is a successful effort to cripple large parts of the network. Although there has never been an example of a power utility being crippled by an act of terrorism, it is conceivable that a mutant algorithm can be released into the network to cripple large 4 ESS telephone switching machines or ATM hardware, virtually bringing large chunks of the network to a halt. The safety of the network needs to be protected.
A completely different area of safety is access to minors, solicitation and "electronic stalking." The infrastructure must address these issues.
Every individual and indeed every institution, has basic rights to privacy. This is especially important in education. The EFF believes that double key encryption systems are the most viable and practical technologies now within reach. An excellent article about the EFF's views appears in the June 1994 issue of Wired magazine. In educational settings, there are important issues of privacy, ranging from the simple protection of highly confidential information about students, faculty and other members of the institutions to the range of inquiries that individuals are investigating.
In the National Information Infrastructure, for the first time in the electronic information age we find the notion of electronic piracy. There are two main issues: Prevention and Punishment.
How is electronic piracy to be prevented? In a recent case, a small startup software company had over 3 million lines of code stolen and distributed all over the world. There is no way to rectify the crime, which represents the loss of a $2 million plus investment for the software company. Although this was done as a prank, there was still great economic harm inflicted. There are other examples in which significant amounts of private and governmental research are being distributed across the net. And there are untold numbers of instances that have never come to light where organizations, corporations and individuals have "stolen" information of high value and used it in the competitive fray. In addition to issues of how this will be prevented again (double encryption is one help but not a panacea), there are issues of monitoring the network in some way. This raises the specter of Big Brother looking over the shoulder in every electronic transaction.
Notwithstanding these concerns, what happens when someone is caught engaged in credit fraud, theft of data or other reprehensible acts? What is the penalty when there is no physical harm, when it is simply an economic crime?
Another difficult area of concern for the EFF is the ownership of NII issues. Although these NII issues are clear, a variety of thorny ownership issues come into the fray. The internet backbone has made possible the interfacing of literally thousands of computers. Some of these, such as Delphi and America On-line, utilize these backbones yet did not pay for early development of them. However, they are in the process of extracting payment through electronic commerce from their members. In an educational context, should this be allowed? Should the commercial networks have an obligation to provide free access to educational institutions and for educational activities? How does the tax payer, aside from taxes, recapture their own investment over the years?
Summation
The area of regulation, from an educational point of view, is perhaps the most troubling. Who oversees and reviews the regulations? Is there a huge bureaucracy in the future. What is the role of peer review? Who has police powers and who polices the police?
Note: the views expressed in this document are an interpretation and unless explicitly noted do not represent the actual viewpoints of the named organizations.
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