The United States vs. Craig Neidorf: A Viewpoint on Electronic Publishing, Constitutional Rights and Hacking

In the context of the new milieu created by computers and networks, a new form of threat has emerged – the computer criminal capable of damaging or disrupting the electronic infrastructure, invading people’s privacy, and performing industrial espionage … A significant number of these hackers may go on to become serious computer criminals. To design an intervention that will discourage people from entering into criminal acts, we must first understand the hacker culture since it reveals the concerns of hackers that must be taken into account. We must also understand the concerns of companies and law enforcers. We must understand how all these perspectives interact … Teaching computer ethics may help.

Commercialization of the Internet

The Internet culture supports open communication. People answer questions, make suggestions, and freely discuss a myriad of topics for the satisfaction of participation and perhaps some enhancement to their reputation – the payoffs are not explicit … Will increased commercialization end openness? Must it? Can we find policies that balance openness and marketplace efficiency? Social predictions are difficult at best, and the global nature of the Internet makes them even more difficult. I understand that volunteerism and information exchange are difficult to sustain, and commercial enterprises are very effective. The capitalization and blazing growth of the personal computer industry would have been impossible by any other means. But, something has also been lost in the Microsofting of personal computing.

Commercialization of the Internet

The Internet has an early lead. There are many differences between the Internet and interactive TV or Compuserve and other online services, but decentralization is its key advantage. The Internet grows from the edges, like a Tinkertoy model, free of centralized control and capital formation. An entrepreneur with a spare bedroom can connect a computer to the Internet, and open for business. Two-year market studies and mergers or stock issues are unnecessary. Similarly, software tool providers can develop products, and introduce them to the Internet community with little cost.

Commercialization of the Internet

If online shopping becomes substantial … Many of today’s warehouses, retail establishments, and last-mile delivery by housewives and other consumers, will not be needed. Information products like video, music, software, and news may be selected and delivered online with no retail or warehousing. Market-making businesses, like real-estate listings, travel agencies, and security and commodity brokerage may disappear. Staple items may be purchased online, and delivered via services like United Parcel or new local or manufacturer-owned delivery companies. Industrial and durable goods, where in-depth, comparative information and computer-based analysis tools will be most important, will also be examined and screened online … The employment and resource allocation changes generated by online shopping during the coming century might be comparable to the shifts out of agriculture.

Electrifying Speech: New Communications Technologies and Traditional Civil Liberties

Widespread and fairly allocated computerized resources can offer: increased citizen participation in and oversight of government affairs; assembly, organizing and debate unrestricted by geographical distances or boundaries; decentralized decision making; a challenge to news and publishing monopolies; rapid international exchange of information; and individually-tailored, focused information to combat the information glut that interferes with communication … It is important that those concerned with civil liberties enter the electronic forum with a mixture of optimism and vigilance and take part in the debate on its future while that debate is still open.

Electrifying Speech: New Communications Technologies and Traditional Civil Liberties

As technology makes its easier to match databases and repackage personal information in commercially valuable forms, unease increases over the amount of information gathered and retained, where it comes from, how accurate it is, what use is made of it, and how individuals can control that use, especially when it is reused. Again, computers exacerbate the problem because they create a pervasive and long-lasting information trail that is decreasingly under the control of the individual involved.

Electrifying Speech: New Communications Technologies and Traditional Civil Liberties

Computer monitoring challenges traditional expectations of privacy, exposes nearly every facet of an individual’s life to potential public view and commercial use, alters the relationship between employers and employees, and opens the way for unprecedented government surveillance of citizens. For these reasons, concerns about the courts’ vitiating the Fourth Amendment intensify when computer-based communication and surveillance are involved.

Electrifying Speech: New Communications Technologies and Traditional Civil Liberties

Tribe recommends that policy makers look not at what technology makes possible, but at the core values the Constitution enshrines. The overarching principles of that document, he maintains, are its protection of people rather than places, and its regulation of the actions of the government, not of private individuals … To ensure that these values prevail as technology changes, Tribe proposes adding a 27th amendment to the Constitution to read: ‘This Constitution’s protections for the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly, and its protections against unreasonable searches and seizures and the deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process of law, shall be construed as fully applicable without regard to the technological method or medium through which information content is generated, stored, altered, transmitted or controlled.

Electrifying Speech: New Communications Technologies and Traditional Civil Liberties

Some are old questions in a new context: What, if any, is the role of the government in regulating electronic communication? As more and more information is recorded and stored automatically, how can the right of privacy be balanced with the right to know? What happens to individual protections when information is a salable commodity? Does the form in which information is kept change the government’s obligation to inform its citizens? Other questions arise from the new technologies: When borders can be breached by a keystroke and texts and images can be reproduced and modified without ever being published, what happens to definitions of intellectual property, scholarship, conversation, publication, community, even knowledge itself?