CHANGING
CONTEXTS OF SECURITY
AND
ETHICS: YOU CAN'T HAVE ONE
WITHOUT
THE OTHER
by
Richard Thieme
Because
implicit ethical and moral dimensions emerge from new
social
and cultural structures as a result of technological transformations,
any
discussion of ethics in relationship to the implementation
of new
technologies must take into account a heightened
awareness
of those dimensions. Because the philosophical and religious
systems
that animate society simultaneously undergo transformation,
emergent
paradigms must find expression in formulations
as
explicit and precise as possible and the implications of
those
paradigms correlated to new possibilities for action. Implications
of this
discussion for human identity at all levels necessarily
inform
this exploration.
PostWorldWar
II, R&D in the many branches of the intelligence
community
and military services have shared responsibility for creating
technological
engines that have transformed human identity
and
therefore the Kuhnian paradigm in which we frame possibilities
for
action. Action means options, and options mean ethics. I
define
"ethics" for the purposes of this panel as the options that are
most
congruent with our core notions of identity, self, integrity, and
"the
right thing to do."
Because
all technological transformation processes cause a fundamental"
identity
shift," our awareness of options must be referenced
to
those transformational processes because they also alter
religious
experience, ideation and organizational structures and the
way we
frame ethical imperatives. It is, therefore, our first ethical
imperative
to be accountable to a fuller awareness of what this
means
for the people we serve by our work.
Definitions
of everyday reality—privacy, security, legal guarantees
— are
being transformed by the technologies of surveillance,
information,
and communication. To articulate a moral dimension
in
order to formulate a basis for establishing the core values we
bring
to the various tasks of information security—attack, intrude,
co-opt,
subvert on one hand, and defend, preserve, and sustain on
the
other — we discover that we get that for which we test like a
physicist
determining whether photons are particles or waves.
"Common
sense reality" is a function of the technologies from
which
our social and psychological lives emerge. Those technologies
are
invisible frames because we live inside the picture, so if
we
define ethical issues in the context created by prior technologies
then we
derive familiar recognizable and comforting concepts
as a
result, but ones that unfortunately no longer fit the real-life
context
created by new technologies. Our ethical decisions are, in
short,
inauthentic. It is not that we deceive others but that we first
deceive
ourselves. That is the heart of the problem.
We do
not share a vocabulary, much less a consensus, for discussing
how
those technologies informcontemporary cultural structures.
Yet the
need to have this discussion is itself an implicit consequence
of the
changes I am describing.
Therefore,
even a cursory exploration of ethical issues in computer
security
must include a meta-ethical dimension, one congruent
with
the newly emergent forms and structures of our lives, up to
and
including geopolitical and extraterrestrial structures (i.e., confronting
the
realities mandated by permanent space colonies, lunar
andMartian
outposts, and the recontextualization of air and ground
war by
space war).
"All
great truths," said George Bernard Shaw, "begin as blasphemies."
[17]
Today's blasphemy is tomorrow's "truth." Between
times,
however, we live in the fog of war. In a world which posits
terrorists
(i.e., enemies of social and economic order) as the Other,
the
mind of society is the battlefield. Images and ideas are the primary
weapons,
and the means by which they come into being and
move
through human networks is the subtext of all security. The
paradigms
we use determine the questions we are capable of thinking
and
asking. The formulation of relevant questions may be more
important
than the answers.
A full
discussion of this subject requires much more space than
I want
to fill, so let me highlight key concepts:
(1)
Information security as one task, both offensive and defensive,
of the
intelligence community sanctions breaking foreign laws
while
prohibiting similar activities on American soil. But simple
distinctions
of "foreign" and "domestic" no longer hold. The convergence
of
enabling technologies of intrusion, interception, and
panoptic
reach, combined with a sense of urgency about the counterterror
imperative
and a clear mandate from our leaders to do everything
possible
to defeat an amorphous non-state entity defined by
behaviors
rather than boundaries, borders, or even a clear ideological
allegiance,
has created an ominous but invisible set of conditions
that
undermine the previous cornerstones of law, ethics, and
even
religious traditions.
(2)
Identity is a function of boundaries. An "individual self" defined
by a
boundary around biological processes and the complex of
energy
and information radiated by those processes is undermined
by the
erosion of those boundaries by the use of connective technologies.
The
"individual self" we take for granted emerged a few
hundred
years ago from a cultural shift and is a social construction
of
reality. New technologies deconstruct it as we speak.
(3)
Security, privacy, and intelligence gathering are corollaries
of
individual and national identities and how they relate to one another.
Ethics
is a description of "what works," i.e., what is "right"
for
those identities at different levels of complexity and according
to the
ultimate goal, whether defense of a community or integrity
of an
individual.
(4)
Security is a function of boundaries. Boundaries define the
"other"
that threatens "us" and "us" is a felt experience of clan,
tribal,
and societal kinship still. Prior to the emergence of writing
and the
religions it facilitated, the "enemy" was the "Other."
Ancient
societies
defined the enemy as one who was not a member of
the
tribe. After the emergence of writing, the enemy morphed and
became
– in Christian scriptures, for example – that in ourselves
which
must be fought, resisted, or transcended. This shift in consciousness
was a
result of emergent technologies of writing. This
distinction
is critical because security ethics exist in the tension
created
by these conflicting definitions.
When
the enemy is "within" the body politic, defined as an element
that
threatens societal order and economic well-being, defined
no
longer as a nation-state that threatens our political existence as a
nation
state, then the distinction between criminals and terrorists or
dissenters
and supporters of terrorism blurs. Accordingly the tools
considered
appropriate to their identification and neutralization will
also
blur.
We
continue to speak of ethical norms in relationship to the cultural
past as
if it is still the context of our beliefs and actions. We
speak
of individuals as primary moral agents. We speak of nation
states
as primary determinants of our collective identities. We
speak
of the intelligence mission as if "we" who live inside one
nation
are intercepting or penetrating or subverting the technical
processes
and social dynamics of others who are also "inside" the
boundary
of a nation state that defines them.
Those
distinctions no longer hold.
(6)
Current technologies make speaking of interception obsolete.
Our
technologies constitute the physical framework, and software
and
informational contexts, of a pan-global society. Boundaries between
elements
of the network, between the networks that make up
the
network, that is, are arbitrary and porous. We live in a world
literally
without walls. Every attribute of a process or structure that
broadcasts
or transmits information about itself by any physical or
electromagnetic
means can be detected, often at the source. Often
enough,
those who built the system in the first place engineer
information
to come to them. "Here" and "there" are distinctions
without
a difference.
(7)What
if that technology is reverse engineered and used against
Americans
in a way thanmight be said to violate the Fourth Amendment,
for
example? TheMoebius Strip nature of life in a networked
world
guarantees that unintended consequences must find their way
back to
the hands (and minds) that made them. In the same way,
the
idea of "blowback" from disinformation operations conducted
in
other countries is obsolete: all stories in all publications flow
into
the single information waters in which we live.
(8)
Identity at a fundamental level is transformed. Digital identities
can be
appropriated, yes, but more than that, we can invent
them on
the fly and determine at the moment of action or execution
to
which matrix we are related as a node in the network. Our
identities
exist as potentialities made actual by our intention at the
moment
of action. They are the equivalent of quantum states, fixed
only
when expressed. Identity in relationship to security then becomes a matter of
observation
and not assertion. Only multi-level observation penetrates
the
skin sufficiently to reach the meta-level determined by
actions
which may support or contradict identity-assertions.
(9)
Computer scientist Langdon Winner wrote, "To invent a new
technology
requires society to invent the kinds of people who will
use it,
with new practices, relationships and identities supplanting
the
old." [21] In case after case, the move to computerize and digitize
means
many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone
liquid,
losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized
expression.
As new patterns solidify, both useful artifacts
and the
texture of human relations that surround them are often
much
different from what existed previously.
This
insight has implications for security and ethics. As boundaries
go
liquid, the task of defining appropriate behaviors in relationship
to
moral norms becomes difficult because the phrase
"moral
norms" is a metaphor for the context that is generally invisible
to
members of a society but not to sophisticated computer
professionals,
an elite sanctioned to manipulate those underlying
norms
on behalf of ends considered important enough to justify a
variety
of means to achieve them.
Therefore:
Computer
professionals exercise an implicit, de facto thought leadership
because
they create structures that bind and inform society
and
civilization. They create frames of human behavior that determine
how we
think about ourselves as possibilities for action. Their
real
implicit charge is not "to defend and protect a nation" but to
stabilize
a world.
On
whose behalf are they acting? Who do they serve? To what
end? On
the level of the data themselves, the indeterminate but
ultimate
destination of the data and how they are aggregated to create
an
image of reality is lost unless the identity of the data and
the
people securing them are tracked precisely. In effect, people
become
instantiations of data because only data are meaningful in
this
context. Yet ethics posits "individual" human beings as the ultimate
value
in the universe, even as those "individuals" vanish like
the
grin of the Cheshire cat in the process.
In
short: what's a guy or gal to do?
This
process has happened before and will happen again. In the
past,
however, as Alfred North Whitehead said 4, such processes
have
often all but wrecked the societies in which they occurred.
The
dire possibility of societal disintegration elevates the moral responsibility
of the
security and intelligence communities to a higher
level.
Linked in cooperative activity, they are responsible for maintaining
social
and global order at a level of understanding far beyond
that
formulated in the past by any one nation. These communities
in the
aggregate constitute a global community of practitioners
who
share an ethos and modalities of operation not available
to
ordinary citizens; they have thereby created for themselves an
intrinsic
vocation or calling to maintain global order in a way that
is
consistent with the ethical norms and moral order articulated
by the
great cultural traditions even as those traditions are also
transformed
by diverse technologies—and even though they and we
recognize
that in practice that moral order and those ethical norms
are
often violated as a matter of practice.
Managing
these concerns is quite a challenge. As Machiavelli
said in
The Prince during an equally transformational era:
".
. .there is nothingmore difficult to take in hand, more
perilous
to conduct, or more uncertain in its success,
than to
take the lead in the introduction of a new order
of
things."