What Place for Privacy in a Digital World?

C. S. Lewis, serene at his desk...

Posted by Keith Tidman

When Albert Camus offered this soothing advice in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘Opt for privacy. . . . You need to breathe. And you need to be’, life was still uncomplicated by digital technology. Since then, we have become just so many cogwheels in the global machinery that makes up the ‘Internet of things’ — the multifarious devices that simultaneously empower us and make us vulnerable.

We are alternately thrilled with the power that these devices shower on us — providing an interactive window onto the world, and giving us voice — even as we are dismayed to see our personal information scooped up, stowed, scrutinised for nuggets, reassembled, duplicated, and given up to others. That we may not see this too, that our lives are shared without our being aware, without our freely choosing, and without our being able to prevent their commodification and monetisation only makes it much worse.

Can a human right to privacy, assumed by Camus, still fit within this digitised reality?

Louis Brandeis, a former justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, defined the ‘right to be left alone’ as the ‘most comprehensive of rights, and the right most prized by civilised people’. But that was proffered some ninety years ago. If individuals and societies still value that principle, then today they are challenged to figure out how to balance the intrusively ubiquitous connectivity of digital technology, and the sanctity of personal information implicit in the ‘right to be left alone’. That is, the fundamental human right articulated by the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home, or correspondence’.

It’s safe to assume that we’re not about to scrap our digital devices and nostalgically return to analog lives. To the contrary, inevitable shifts in society will require more dependence on increasingly sophisticated digital technology for a widening range of purposes. Participation in civic life will call for more and different devices, and greater vacuuming and moving around of information. Whether the latter will translate into further loss of the human right to privacy, as is risked, or that society manages change in order to preserve or even recover lost personal privacy, the draft of that narrative is still being written.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that intervention — by policymakers, regulators, technologists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and ethicists, among others — may coalesce to avoid the erosion of personal privacy taking a straight upward trajectory. Urgency, and a commitment to avoid and even reverse further erosion, will be key.

Some contemporary philosophers have argued that claims to a human right to privacy are redundant, for various reasons. An example is when privacy is presumed embedded in other human rights, such as personal property — distinguished from property held in common — and protection of our personal being. But this seems dubious; in fact, one might flip the argument on its head — that is, our founding other rights on the right of privacy, the latter being more fundamentally based in human dignity and moral values. It’s a more nuanced, ethics-based position that makes the one-dimensional assertion that ‘If you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear’ all the more specious.

Furthermore, without a right to privacy being carved out in concrete terms, such as codified in law and constitutions, it may simply get ignored, rendering it non-defendable. For all that, we value privacy, and with it to prevent other people’s intrusion and meddling in our lives. We cling to the notion of what has been dubbed the ‘inviolate personality’ — the quintessence of being a person. In endorsing this belief in individual interests, one is subscribing to Noam Chomsky’s caution that ‘It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy’. To Chomsky’s point, the informed, ‘willing’ acceptance of social media’s mining and monetising of our personal data provides a contrast.

One parallel factor is the push-pull between what may become normalised governmental access to our personal information and individuals’ assertion of confidentiality and the ‘reasonable expectation’ of privacy. The style of government — from liberal democracies to authoritarianism — matters to government access to personal information: whether for benign use or malign abuse. ‘In good conscience’ is a reasonable guiding principle in establishing the what, when, and how of government access. And in turn, it matters to a fundamental human right to privacy. Meantime, governments may see a need for tools to combat crime and terrorism, allowing surveillance and intelligence gathering through wiretaps and Internet monitoring.

Two and a half centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin foreshadowed this tension between the liberty implied in personal privacy and the safety implied in government’s interest in self-protection. He cautioned: 

‘Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety’. 

Yet, however amorphous these contrary claims to rights might be, as a practical matter society has to resolve the risk-benefit equation and choose how to play its hand. What we conclude is the best solution will likely keep shifting, based on norms and emerging technology.

And the notions of a human right to privacy differ as markedly among cultures as they do among individuals. The definition of privacy and its value may differ both among and within cultures. It would perhaps prove unsurprising if a culture situated in Asia, a culture situated in Africa, a culture situated in Europe, and a culture situated in South or Central America were to frame personal privacy rights differently. But only insofar as both the burgeoning of digital technology and the nature of government influence the privacy-rights landscape.

The reflex may be to anticipate that privacy and human rights will take a straight, if thorny, path. The relentless and quickening emergence of digital technologies drives this impulse. The British writer and philosopher C. S. Lewis provides social context for this impulse, saying:

‘We live … in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private.’

Despite the invasion of people’s privacy, by white-hatted parties (with benign intent) and black-hatted parties (with malign intent), I believe our record thus far represents only an embryonic, inelegant attempt to explore — with perfunctory legal, regulatory, or principled restraint — the rich utility of digital technology.

Nonetheless, if we are to steer clear of the potentially unbridled erosion of privacy rights — to uphold the human right to privacy, however measured — then it will require repeatedly revisiting what one might call the ‘digital social contract’ the community adopts: and resolving the contradiction behind being both ‘citizen-creators’ and ‘citizen-users’ of digital technologies.

The Impossibility of Determinism

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Indeed, free will and determinism. It is a classic problem of metaphysics. No matter what we may think about it, we know that we have a problem. We know that things are physically determined. I line up dominos in a row, and topple the first of them with my finger. It is certain that the whole row of dominos will fall.

Are people then subject to the same kind of determinism? Are we just so many powerless humanoid shapes waiting to be knocked down by circumstances? Or perhaps, to what extent are we subject to such determinism? Is it possible for us to escape our own inner person? Our own history? Our own future? Are we even free to choose our own thoughts—much less our actions? Are we even free to believe? Each of these questions would seem to present us with a range of mightily confusing answers.

I suggest that it may be helpful to try to view the question from a broader perspective—the particular one that comes from consideration of the phenomenon of cause and effect. If I am controlled by indomitable causes, then I am not free. Yet if I am (freely) the cause of my own thoughts and actions, then I am free. Which then is it? Once we understand the dynamics of cause and effect, we should be in a better position to understand free will and determinism.

What is cause and effect?

In our everyday descriptions of our world, we say that, to paraphrase Simon Blackburn, causation is the relation between two events. It holds when, given that one event occurs, ‘it produces, or brings forth, or necessitates the second’. The burrowing aardvark caused the dam to burst; the lightning strike caused the thatch to burn; the medicine caused the patient to rally, and so on. Yet we notice in this something that is immediately problematic—which is that in order to say that there is causality, we need to have carefully defined events before and after.

But such definition is a problem. The philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon wrote of the ‘evil’ we find in defining natural and material things. ‘The definitions themselves consist of words, and those words beget others.’ Aristotle wrote that words consist of features (say, the features of a house), and those features must stand in a certain relation to one another (rubble, say, is not a house). Therefore, not only do we have words within words, but features and relations, too.

Where does it all end? It all ends nowhere. It is an endless regress. Bacon’s ‘evil’ means that our definitions dissipate into the universe. It seems much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is not hard to see that one will never find the money. Full definitions ultimately reach into the void.

If we want to be consistent about it, there are no events. In order to obtain events, we need to set artificial limits to our words—and artificial limits to reality itself, by excluding unwanted influences on our various constructions. But that is not the way the world really is in its totality. More than this, these unwanted influences always seem to enter the picture again somewhere along the line. This is a big part of the problem in our world today.

Of course, cause and effect quite simply work: he lit the fire; I broke the urn; they split the atom. This is good as far as it goes—yet again, such explanations work because we define before and after—and that very definition strips away a lot of what is really going on.

Where does this leave us? It leaves us without a reason to believe in cause and effect—even if we are naturally disposed to thinking that way. There is no rational framework to support it.

Someone might object. Even if we have no befores and afters, we still have a reality which is bound by the laws of the universe. There is therefore some kind of something which is not free. Yet every scientific law is about events before and after. Whatever is out there, it has nothing in common—that we can know of anyway—with such a scheme.

This may be a new way of putting it, but it is not a new idea. Albert Einstein, as an example, said that determinism is a feature of theories, rather than any aspect of the world directly. While, at the end of this post, we cannot prove free will, we can state that notions of determinism are out of the question, in the world as we know it. The world is something else, which we have not yet understood.

Extinction Crisis? The solution may be privatisation

Endangered species can often be protected with comparatively tiny amounts 

of resources. Pictured, the critically endangered Black-flanked rock wallaby whose 
protection needs are measured in thousands of dollars - Image via WWF Australia

Posted by Martin Cohen

Looking around the world, there are so many problems that seem so intractable and the solutions so far off, that it can seem as if it is better to, well not look around the world. 'Climate change', for example, where it has been estimated by Danish statistician and reformed ‘skeptic’, Bjorn Lomborg, that the cost of reducing the world's temperature by the end of the century by a ‘grand total of three tenths of one degree’ is ... $100 trillion. That's not small beans. In terms of charitable donations, you'd need to find 100 million people ready to chip in a million each..

For any number of reasons, that cash ain't gonna be raised and those abatement measures - however worthy - are not going to be made.

Yet in fact there are a whole range of environmental problems which do have relatively straightforwards solutions - and require only tiny investments. These small but vital programmes are often starved of resources.

Take extinctions in Australia, for example, a topic I asked Friends of the Earth (UK) to campaign on back in the 1990s  mainly to highlight UK business links to forest clearance. To run a campaign might have costs a few thousand pounds but after discussions with the then Head of FoE and meeting the senior staff including the Biodiversities campaigner for a roundtable on the issues, I was told there were no resources for it. They offered to run a Press Release campaign if I wrote it instead. And then reneged on that too.

The point is not that I don't like Friends of the Earth much, in fact I think they do a lot of good work, (they helped me lead a campaign that saved the Yorkshire Moors from a four-lane motorway, probably the only time the organisation actually reversed a road scheme that had been formally approved) but that relying on environmentalists to save the world is a mistake. The economics points at a problem and a paradox: environmental pressure groups exist and make money out of environmental horror stories - they have no financial interest in saving anything. A campaign like Climate Change in which a bottomless pit of money must be raised suits certain people very well, even though it can never achieve its ends.

Meanwhile time is running out! Talk about an ‘extinction crisis’ ... It is there all right. But the solutions don't require grandiose schemes to control the world’s climate - they require small concrete actions to preserve habitat.

Half of all the species lost in modern time have been in Australia. In the last 150 years, one in eight of Australia's mammal species - which live(d) nowhere else on earth, have been driven out of existence, as the Australians literally bulldozed their forests into desert, in pursuit of grazing for sheep and cows. At the same time, the land value stolen from the defenceless animals and plundered form Australia's native people is actually tiny.

The Bramble Cay Melomys that lived only on a tiny island in the Torres Strait could have been saved if the island had but been bought and made into a sanctuary. Instead the fate of the little rodent was determined by red tape and political indifference.

Land clearing, invasive farming, extermination programs, lack of monitoring - all these are essentially money-driven failings with economic responses possible. To save the Spotted Tailed Quoll, for example, needs only to preserve a chunk of land from the insatiable thirst of Australia's farmers for land clearance. Likewise, the Black-flanked Rock-wallaby needs a small reserve declaring to cover it's now much diminished range. Such things essentially can be investments - yet the world's billionaire philanthropists - I'm looking at you Mr Gates, Mr Buffett! - have so far directed their wealthy and otherwise worthy Foundations only to talk about human needs - medicine, education, governance even. yet biodiversity and species preservation is surely just as much a vital part of our shred human shared inheritance as any other aspect of human life.

At the moment, attention is rightly focussed on the land clearance in the Amazon rainforest, land clearance often financed directly or indirectly by Western banks and institutions. Yet here's an idea for those with resources: buy up sections of the Amazon and hold them on behalf of their indigenous peoples as ecological parks, scientific resources and sustainably farmed forests. Such privately owned 'ecofarms' would be able to resist predation by those set on both genocide and ecocide. They only need investors!

It has already been done successfully for example in the conservation-driven Kruger Private Reserves in Africa. There, the connecting of habitats alone serves to improve the survival chances of many species in the region.

‘Just War’ Theory: Its Endurance Through the Ages

The Illustrious Hugo Grotius of the Law of Warre and Peace: 
With Annotations, III Parts, and Memorials of the Author’s Life and Death.
Book with title page engraving, printed in London, England, by T. Warren for William Lee in 1654.

Posted by Keith Tidman

To some people, the term ‘just war’ may have the distinct ring of an oxymoron, the more so to advocates of pacifism. After all, as the contention goes, how can the lethal violence and destruction unleashed in war ever be just? Yet, not all of the world’s contentiousness, neither historically nor today, lends itself to nonmilitary remedies. So, coming to grips with the realpolitik of humankind inevitability waging successive wars over several millennia, philosophers, dating back to ancient Greece and Rome — like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero — have thought about when and how war might be justified.

Building on such early luminary thinkers, the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his influential text, Summa Theologica, advanced the principles of ‘just war’ to a whole other level. Aquinas’s foundational work led to the tradition of just-war principles, broken down into jus ad bellum (the right to resort to war to begin with) and jus in bello (the right way to fight once war is underway). Centuries later came a new doctrinal category, jus post bellum (the right way to act after war has ended).

The rules that govern going to war, jus ad bellum, include the following:

• just authority, meaning that only legitimate national rulers may declare war;

• just cause, meaning that a nation may wage war only for such purposes as self-defence, defence of other nations, and intervention against the gravest inhumanity;

• right intentions, meaning the warring state stays focused on the just cause and doesn’t veer toward illegitimate causes, such as material and economic gain, hegemonic expansionism, regime change, ideological-cultural-religious dissimilarities, or unbridled militarism;

• proportionality, meaning that as best can be determined, the anticipated goods outweigh the anticipated evil that war will cause;

• a high probability of success, meaning that the war’s aim is seen as highly achievable; 

and...

• last resort, meaning that viable, peaceful, diplomatic solutions have been explored — not just between potentially warring parties, but also with the intercession of supranational institutions, as fit — leaving no alternative to war in order to achieve the just cause.

The rules that govern the actual fighting of war, jus in bello, include the following: 

• discrimination, meaning to target only combatants and military objectives, and not civilians or fighters who have surrendered, been captured, or are injured; 

• proportionality, meaning that injury to lives and property must be in line with the military advantage to be gained; 

• responsibility, meaning that all participants in war are accountable for their behaviour; 

and... 

• necessity, meaning that the least-harmful military means, such as choice of weapons, tactics, and amount of force applied, must be resorted to.

The rules that govern behaviour following war’s end, jus post bellum, typically include the following: 

• proportionality, meaning the terms to end war and transition to peace should be reasonable and even-handed; 

• discrimination, meaning that the victor should treat the defeated party fairly and not unduly punitively; 

• restorative, meaning promoting stability, mapping infrastructural redevelopment, and guiding institutional, social, security, and legal order; 

and... 

• accountability, meaning that determination of culpability and retribution for wrongful actions (including atrocities) during hostilities are reasonable and measured.

Since the time of the early philosophers like Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and the ascribed ‘father of international law’ Hugo Grotius (The Law of War and Peace, frontispiece above), the principles tied to ‘just war’, and its basis in moral reciprocity, have shifted. One change has entailed the increasing secularisation of ‘just war’ from largely religious roots.

Meanwhile, the failure of the seventeenth-century Peace of Westphalia — which ended Europe’s devastating Thirty Years’ War and Eighty Years’ War, declaring that states would henceforth honour other nations’ sovereignty — has been particularly dreadful. As well intentioned as the treaty was, it failed to head off repeated militarily bloody incursions into others’ territory over the last three and a half centuries. Furthermore, the modern means of war have necessitated revisiting the principles of just wars — despite the theoretical rectitude of wars’ aims.

One factor is the extraordinary versatility, furtiveness, and lethality of modern means of war — and remarkably accelerating transformation. None of these ‘modern means’ were, of course, even imaginable as just-war doctrine was being developed over the centuries. The bristling technology is familiar: from precision (‘smart’) munitions to nuclear weapons, drones, cyber weapons, long-range missiles, stealthy designs, space-based systems, biological/chemical munitions, global power projection by sea and air, hypervelocity munitions, increasingly sophisticated, lethal, and hard-to-defeat AI weapons, and autonomous weapons (increasingly taking human controllers out of the picture). In their respective ways, these devices are intended to exacerbate the ‘friction and fog’ and lethality of war for the opponent, as well as to lessen exposure of one’s own combatants to threats. 

Weapons of a different ilk, like economic sanctions, are meant to coerce opponents into complying with demands and complying with certain behaviours, even if civilians are among the more direly affected. Tactics, too, range widely, from proxies to asymmetric conflicts, special-forces operations, terrorism (intrinsically episodic), psychological operations, targeted killings of individuals, and mercenary insertion.

So, what does this inventory of weapons and tactics portend regarding just-war principles? The answer hinges on the warring parties: who’s using which weapons in which conflict and with which tactics and objectives. The idea behind precision munitions, for example, is to pinpoint combatant targets while minimising harm to civilians and civilian property.

Intentions aren’t foolproof, however, as demonstrated in any number of currently ongoing wars. Yet, one might argue that, on balance, the results are ‘better’ than in earlier conflicts in which, for example, blankets of inaccurate gravity (‘dumb’) bombs were dropped, and where indifference among combatants as to the effects on innocents — impinging on noncombatant immunity — had become the rule rather than the exception.

There are current ‘hot’ conflicts to which one might readily apply just-war theory. Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, India/Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among sundry others, come to mind. (As well as brinkmanship, such as with Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.) The nature of these conflicts ranges from international to civil to terrorist to hybrid. Their adherence to jus ad bellum and jus in bello narratives and prescriptions differ radically from one to another. These conflicts’ jus post bellum narratives — meaning the right way to act after war has ended — have still to reveal their final chapter in concrete treaties, as for example in the current negotiations between the Taliban and United States in Afghanistan, almost two decades into that wearyingly ongoing war. 

The reality is that the breach left by these sundry wars, either as they end abruptly or simply peter out in exhaustion, will be filled by another. As long as the realpolitik inevitability of war continues to haunt us, humanity needs Aquinas’s guidance.

Just-war doctrine, though developed in another age and necessarily having undergone evolutionary adaptation to parallel wars’ changes, remains enduringly relevant — not to anaesthetise the populace, let alone to entirely cleanse war ethically, but as a practical way to embed some measure of order in the otherwise unbridled messiness of war.

Picture Post #48: Gratifying Human Necessities

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.' 

Posted by Tessa Den Uyl

Florence, May 2019

Horses have been bred to gratify human necessities.  For centuries, the horse has been the vehicle for transportation of goods and people.  Above all, it has been a symbol for war.  When motors were invented, the horse retired from its often ‘inhorse’ duties, and we could advance our propensities in other ways.

The picture has something to do with tourism, expansion, and war.  More deeply, it reflects something about the human mind, which flaunts its inventiveness -- turning everything into a tool.  In the prancing horse on the Ferrari logo, we may gaze and wonder:

            what or whom is served with this kind of human resourcefulness?