Author Archives: David J. Krieger

About David J. Krieger

PhD University of Chicago. Habilitation 1. Science of Religions, University of Lucerne, Switzerland, Habilitation 2. Communication Science, University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Co-Director Institute for Communication & Leadership IKF, Lucerne. Focus: Hermeneutics, Systems Theory, Network Theory, Semiotics, Intercultural Communication, New Media, eSociety

Network Publicy Governance and Cyber Security

Hardly a day goes by that the media do not confront us with headlines on the latest breaches, hacks, and attacks, whether political, criminal, or both and which effect all areas of society. Many of these attacks are not even new, but sometimes years old and have only recently been discovered and reported. It is therefore reasonable to assume that there are many security breaches that we don’t know about and perhaps, for various reasons, never will. At least with regard to what we do know, the cost of cybercrime and cyber attacks has been estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, quite apart from the other damaging effects, for example, loss of trust in the effectiveness of our law enforcement and security institutions.  It has become apparent that traditional law enforcement and security measures do not work when it comes to preventing or combatting cyber-warfare, cyber-crime, and cyber-terrorism. For example, it is often difficult to find the scene of the crime, the weapons or tools used in the crime, to assess the damage done, or determine who is responsible. And even if it is possible to find out who did it, this information is mostly useless. One is left with the impression that despite enormous efforts by law enforcement and security institutions, cybercriminals and hackers move through our networks with impunity.

Of course, there are many reasons for this, including our own negligence. We ourselves, whether it be infrastructure and software providers or users are often a major part of the problem. The state of simple and normal “digital hygiene,” such as updates, anti-virus software, strong passwords, and so on is so deplorable that it makes you WANNACRY.

What can we do? Whereas new technologies of trust by design and new networked organizational models are slowly becoming focuses of interest for cyber security solutions, legal and ethical proposals seem not to have moved beyond positions developed in the bygone industrial era. The digital transformation seems not to have changed much in our conceptions of what security means and how freedom, autonomy, and human dignity are to be preserved in the information age. Although ethics and discussions of values and norms may appear of only incidental significance when standing on the front in the struggle against cyber-crime, cyber-warfare, and cyber-terrorism, they play a very important role in the foundational regulative frameworks that condition law enforcement and security strategies. For this reason, it is perhaps time to take a critical look at ethics with regard to cyber security.

If values and norms do not come from God or his representatives on Earth – including pure reason –, and if they are not hardwired into our DNA, then it is at least plausible that they emerge from the interactions of social actors. What has become apparent in the digital era is that technologies, artifacts, and non-humans must also be considered to be social actors. Non-humans have become our partners in constructing social order. This means that the “affordances” of information and communication technologies (ICTs), contribute to our norms and values. It is the network as a whole that is the actor and the actor is always a network. Let us therefore ask: What do networks want? What are the norms inherent in the affordances of ICTs?

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Being Meaning

Let’s face it, being is meaning. That is, of course, unless you know about something that has no meaning. If you do, please tell us. Remember, however, as Frank Ramsey once told Wittgenstein, you can’t whistle it either. So as long as we are talking we are in the realm of meaning and that’s it. There is nothing else. And if there were, it would be inside the realm of meaning. The outside is paradoxically inside. We draw the borders, we make the exclusions, it is we who put things outside. The problem here is the “we“. Who are we who make meaning? Are we those Homo sapiens with the big brains, the heroes of radical constructivism? If so, then why would our otherwise selfish, inconsiderate, and destructive species be so generous as to make everything else in the world? Not to mention the sheer unimaginable diversity and creativity of things. Do we really think we make meaning? If not, then who? God has been the best answer to this question for ages. But here again there are so many Gods that it is difficult to understand how they manage to cooperate, especially since they seem not to want to have anything to do with each other. So the God answer is not very satisfying if you look at the big picture and not merely your own garden. The next best answer would appear to be that meaning makes itself. After all, nothing comes from nothing. Selforganization, autocatalysis, spontaneous emergence; take your pick. These seem to be the best answers we have. But then we should admit that “we” is no longer our humble species, but “everything.” Everything has a “voice” of its own and contributes to the “collective.” Everything is involved in making meaning. This is what it “means” to exist. We human beings may play an important role in this process, but maybe not as important as we think. Anyway, we have a certain “responsibility.” We are obliged to “respond” to the many voices, claims, interventions, and disturbances that things are doing in their efforts to come to be.  This could be thought of as the “moral responsibility” of being human, to respond not only to other people, but to all things as well.  If language were indeed a gift, then responsibility in this sense would amount to acknowledging the gift and showing some kind of thankfulness. Heidegger pointed out the close associations between “thinking,” “thing,” and “thanking.” He referred to this interdependency as “gathering.” Gathering things together into one world, that is, allowing (and helping) everything to have its voice, its “say” in what the world means. Latour has formulated this moral responsibility in terms of the institution of a “parliament of things” and proposed a new constitution for the anthropocene in which humans and nonhumans together share responsibility for gathering the “collective.” In an age when the anthropos is seen as the dominating factor, it is perhaps appropriate that humans accept responsibility and no longer push it off onto God.  This seems to make ecology into the most atheistic of all sciences. But no one said the Gods have to be excluded, after all, they also have something to say, each in their own way. So let’s face it, being is meaning, but meaning is not yours or mine or anybody’s; meaning belongs to everything, indeed it is the expression of belonging, the belonging together of one world.

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Fake News or the Gamification of Politics

Let’s begin by admitting that news has always been fake. There is no media product that is not filtered, framed, and formatted. Filtered means that always some information is selected and other information overlooked. Framed means that the information selected out of all possible information is put into some kind of interpretive frame that describes what is going on. The frame decides whether we are dealing with an accident, an act of terrorism, a prank, or an advertising campaign. Formatted means that selected and framed information is always presented in a certain way, as image, text, video, audio, etc., all of which have their own rules of production, distribution, and consumption. These three “F”s create a gap between what “really” happened and what the media tell us happened. This is a fact. It remains a fact even when professional journalists are replaced by citizen journalists who upload their spontaneous and accidental photos, videos, and comments onto platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. So what do we do about it? Up until the advent of “post-truth” politics and “fake news” – formerly known as propaganda – there was apparently no pressing need to do anything about it. The experts, authorities, gatekeepers, and institutions of knowledge and truth were solidly in place and functioned quite well. We could tell the difference between the New York Times and Gawker and there really was a difference to tell. Although we knew that the media didn’t give us the truth, at least what we got was good enough to make reasonable decisions and get along with our neighbors. This is no longer the case.

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Is There Such a Thing as “Informational Privacy”?

The concept of “information” is not very informative. This is because there are so many different meanings to the word. Almost every scientific discipline has their own definition, from physics and chemistry to biology, informatics, mathematics, philosophy, and even sociology, which has long been talking about an “information society.” So what does “information” mean? What is information? Obviously, we need to decide, that is, to filter out much of what can be discussed about the topic and select those meanings of the term that are useful for our purpose, namely, attempting to understand what is meant by informational privacy.

According to the classic definition of Alan Westin (Privacy and Freedom 1967), privacy is “the ability to determine for ourselves when, how, and to what extent information about us is communicated to others.” This definition carries with it several important implications. First, privacy is a matter of information. This information must in some way be “about” us, that is, us “personally.” Privacy therefore has to do with a specific kind of information, namely, “personal information,” or as it later became known, “personally identifiable information” (PII). Another important implication of Westin’s understanding of privacy is that it is not the information itself that is most important, but rather the “ability to determine” what information is communicated to others. Privacy therefore does not primarily reside in any particular informational content, for example, information that would somehow describe a person so intimately that he or she would not be able to communicate it without losing privacy. On the contrary, it would seem that privacy resides above all in the freedom to communicate or not to communicate information, whatever it may be. For example, it could be argued that our genome is so personal and intimate that any communication of our genome to others would automatically constitute a violation of privacy. The implication of Westin’s definition, however, is that we could well determine to do so, that is, if we wanted, we could publish our genome on the internet for the world to see and this would not constitute a violation of privacy. If someone else however, for example, our doctor were to do this without our consent, then, of course, this would constitute a violation of privacy. Privacy is therefore a matter of consent, of decision, of freedom and choice and does not reside in any particular information. This means that privacy consists primarily in the will, in the act of deciding to communicate. Only if my free choice about communicating information is infringed upon can we speak of a violation of my privacy. Finally, Westin’s definition assumes that privacy essentially has to do with communication, that is, privacy is the right to communicate or not to communicate. A right to privacy in this sense only makes sense, however, if communication is an option, something we can choose to do or not do. This means that Watzlawick must have been wrong when he stated that “we cannot not communicate.” If human beings are essentially social and human existence is constituted by communication this would make privacy as Westin defines it impossible. Only if information about a person is something that is not necessarily and automatically communicatively constituted and distributed in social space can privacy be possible.

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The Value of Privacy

Perhaps the most important legacy of Foucault and Postmodernism is to have made the business of critique much more difficult and complicated than it was back in the days when all workers wore white hats and all capitalists black. Today one has become wary of seeing any cultural, social, or political value as simply good in itself and worthy of protection, without investigating the extent to which it participates, however unwittingly, in a larger regime of power, inequality, and exploitation. Hegel had long ago pointed out that the master and the slave need each other. Each helps to make the other who he/she is. They work together in order to construct and maintain a certain regime of knowledge and power without which neither of them could exist. Postmodernism, of course, does not share Hegel’s optimism that contradictions will be resolved by progress, or even Marx’s faith in revolution. If critique is still to be possible, then it cannot take the easy route of singling out the bad guys, but must lay bare the many complex interdependencies that together constitute a society in its entirety. That this is a hard lesson to learn is illustrated by the lengthy report of the Committee on Privacy in the Information Age established by the National Research Council Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age (edited by J. Waldo, H. S. Lin, L. I. Millett, 2007).  Admittedly, the Committee does not understand its mission to be the elaboration of critical social theory. Nonetheless, it aims to “raise awareness of the spider web of connectedness among the actions we take, the policies we pass, the expectations we change , the ‘flip side’ of impacts policies have on privacy.” The aim of the Committee is to “paint a big picture that would sketch the contours of the full set of interactions and tradeoffs” and “take into account changes in technology, business, government, and other organizational demand for and supply of personal information…” (20).

The upshot of this ambitious program is that privacy as an undeniable and inalienable personal and social value that demands to be protected by law. This view is echoed on the international level in the Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age (2014), which declares that “there is universal recognition of the fundamental importance, and enduring relevance, of the right of privacy and of the need to ensure that it is safeguarded, in law and in practice” (5).  The underlying assumption of both reports is that whatever may be wrong with society, privacy is not part of the problem. It is the solution. A solution that must at all costs be defended against threats arising from the digital transformation of the 21st Century. This raises at least two important questions. What is the value that privacy has for individuals and society? Why has privacy become a central issue in understanding the global network society?

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