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Information Privacy and The Internet
Apr. 2nd, 2021 04:42 pmI am digging through boxes upon boxes upon boxes looking for where I put my stupid birth certificate (which I need for some paperwork). I had taken it out of my wallet in 2019 because I was traveling overseas and figured that carrying my passport and birth certificate was probably a security risk (doing so domestically was as well, probably more so), and I put it somewhere safe. It's in the house, but it might as well be on Ceres. As I dig through boxes, I am uncovering some essays that I wrote but never posted.
The first one was written for a 4th year class in the "Technology, Society, Environment Studies" (TSES) department, an odd little department at Carleton University. The class was called "Information Technology and Society", which is a pretty cool and important topic (which is why I took it as an elective). It uses a case study of a Supreme Court of Canada decision as the foundation to ask questions about whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the Internet, and manages to tie that to the notions of entropy, memetics, and the evolution of blue-green algae... go figure. The defendant, Spencer, had been arrested and charged with distributing child pornography. The Supreme Court decided that the police did violate his rights, but the crime had been committed and was sufficiently egregious that his appeal was dismissed (and he went to prison). It does bring up many questions about privacy as secrecy, as control, and as anonymity (the latter of which is least understood). I seem to remember I got a good mark on this essay.
Information Privacy and The Internet
On June 13, 2014 the Supreme Court of Canada, in the case of R. vs. Spencer, found that the constitutional rights of Matthew David Spencer had been violated when the police requested “pursuant to s. 7(3)(c.1)(ii) of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)”1, and subsequently received “without prior judicial authorization”1, identifying information from his Internet Service Provider (ISP) based on his Internet Protocol (IP) address and the time window of his criminal usage of the Internet. Spencer was tried and convicted with evidence collected from his residence – with a proper warrant secured to actually enter and search the house, and seize his computer equipment – based on the police’s observations of his online activities and the identifying information received from the ISP that led them there. However, Spencer appealed the conviction stating that the technique used to locate him was a violation of his Section 8 Charter rights, which states that “everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure”2. The case ultimately went to the Supreme Court of Canada which ruled that, yes, his rights had been unwittingly violated by the police, but that due to the nature of his crimes, “the exclusion of the evidence rather than its admission would bring the administration of justice into disrepute”1, and his appeal was denied. While the search was ultimately deemed to have been illegal, the police “were acting by what they reasonably thought were lawful means to pursue an important law enforcement purpose”1 (in other words, they didn’t understand how PIPEDA worked), and Spencer would do his time.
( The rest of the essay is here... )
The uneasy memetic to and fro between information seemingly “wanting” freedom, and the powerful drive to maintain control over it does not have a hegemonic solution, but rather will reach various states of dynamic equilibria over time. If one considers the memetic notion of info-freedom as a state, then this can be thought of as a “gaseous” phase of information; similarly, the meme of info-privacy can be conceptualized as information being in a “liquid” phase. In the former, information will expand to fill all the possible states available for it to be in and if new ideas (memes, information, data) is introduced into the system, it will over time diffuse through the entire infosphere. In the latter, information is still fluid, but it can be contained, controlled, measured, and distributed by those who manage its container. I humbly propose that what I have described comes complete with a fully-formed set of mathematical tools that could be used in the analysis of the flow of information from the “liquid” to the “gaseous” forms and back again: this field of study is called thermodynamics. Since information has already been framed using thermodynamic concepts (entropy), it seems natural to press the larger toolset available from that field into the study of how information will move towards a state where the flow of information between the “gaseous” and “liquid” states will be in balance – like a pool of liquid water in a vacuum at a certain temperature (where liquid water can still exist) will eventually stabilize into some amount of liquid and some amount of gas. As the pressure increases in the system, the equilibrium point will move toward more water and less gas; or as the temperature increases, that point will favour the gas phase. I would argue that we can consider the Internet (or broader infosphere) as the “box”, but one that is expanding exponentially (decreasing the gas pressure and favouring a gaseous state); but that the amount of information is also expanding exponentially (increasing the pressure and thus favouring a liquid state), and thus the equilibrium point is constantly moving and reacting to decisions we make regarding the extent of our global network infrastructure, privacy legislation, how much information is generated at what rate, and how accessible (from an interpretation standpoint) that information is, amongst other criteria.
Like any other ecosystem that humans participate in, we can and will shape it to suit whatever priorities we have at the time. In the end, if we consider the memetic perspective as accurate, neither absolute OCAP nor complete permissiveness will win, but rather a dynamic and ever-changing balance will be achieved between the two. The challenge we face then is, like trying to model the ecosystem of the Earth, to develop models we can use to analyze its dynamic behaviour, but to do so, we need to increase our understanding, though examinations like the R. vs. Spencer case, of what questions need to be asked.
( And the bibliography is here... )
The first one was written for a 4th year class in the "Technology, Society, Environment Studies" (TSES) department, an odd little department at Carleton University. The class was called "Information Technology and Society", which is a pretty cool and important topic (which is why I took it as an elective). It uses a case study of a Supreme Court of Canada decision as the foundation to ask questions about whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the Internet, and manages to tie that to the notions of entropy, memetics, and the evolution of blue-green algae... go figure. The defendant, Spencer, had been arrested and charged with distributing child pornography. The Supreme Court decided that the police did violate his rights, but the crime had been committed and was sufficiently egregious that his appeal was dismissed (and he went to prison). It does bring up many questions about privacy as secrecy, as control, and as anonymity (the latter of which is least understood). I seem to remember I got a good mark on this essay.
On June 13, 2014 the Supreme Court of Canada, in the case of R. vs. Spencer, found that the constitutional rights of Matthew David Spencer had been violated when the police requested “pursuant to s. 7(3)(c.1)(ii) of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)”1, and subsequently received “without prior judicial authorization”1, identifying information from his Internet Service Provider (ISP) based on his Internet Protocol (IP) address and the time window of his criminal usage of the Internet. Spencer was tried and convicted with evidence collected from his residence – with a proper warrant secured to actually enter and search the house, and seize his computer equipment – based on the police’s observations of his online activities and the identifying information received from the ISP that led them there. However, Spencer appealed the conviction stating that the technique used to locate him was a violation of his Section 8 Charter rights, which states that “everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure”2. The case ultimately went to the Supreme Court of Canada which ruled that, yes, his rights had been unwittingly violated by the police, but that due to the nature of his crimes, “the exclusion of the evidence rather than its admission would bring the administration of justice into disrepute”1, and his appeal was denied. While the search was ultimately deemed to have been illegal, the police “were acting by what they reasonably thought were lawful means to pursue an important law enforcement purpose”1 (in other words, they didn’t understand how PIPEDA worked), and Spencer would do his time.
( The rest of the essay is here... )
The uneasy memetic to and fro between information seemingly “wanting” freedom, and the powerful drive to maintain control over it does not have a hegemonic solution, but rather will reach various states of dynamic equilibria over time. If one considers the memetic notion of info-freedom as a state, then this can be thought of as a “gaseous” phase of information; similarly, the meme of info-privacy can be conceptualized as information being in a “liquid” phase. In the former, information will expand to fill all the possible states available for it to be in and if new ideas (memes, information, data) is introduced into the system, it will over time diffuse through the entire infosphere. In the latter, information is still fluid, but it can be contained, controlled, measured, and distributed by those who manage its container. I humbly propose that what I have described comes complete with a fully-formed set of mathematical tools that could be used in the analysis of the flow of information from the “liquid” to the “gaseous” forms and back again: this field of study is called thermodynamics. Since information has already been framed using thermodynamic concepts (entropy), it seems natural to press the larger toolset available from that field into the study of how information will move towards a state where the flow of information between the “gaseous” and “liquid” states will be in balance – like a pool of liquid water in a vacuum at a certain temperature (where liquid water can still exist) will eventually stabilize into some amount of liquid and some amount of gas. As the pressure increases in the system, the equilibrium point will move toward more water and less gas; or as the temperature increases, that point will favour the gas phase. I would argue that we can consider the Internet (or broader infosphere) as the “box”, but one that is expanding exponentially (decreasing the gas pressure and favouring a gaseous state); but that the amount of information is also expanding exponentially (increasing the pressure and thus favouring a liquid state), and thus the equilibrium point is constantly moving and reacting to decisions we make regarding the extent of our global network infrastructure, privacy legislation, how much information is generated at what rate, and how accessible (from an interpretation standpoint) that information is, amongst other criteria.
Like any other ecosystem that humans participate in, we can and will shape it to suit whatever priorities we have at the time. In the end, if we consider the memetic perspective as accurate, neither absolute OCAP nor complete permissiveness will win, but rather a dynamic and ever-changing balance will be achieved between the two. The challenge we face then is, like trying to model the ecosystem of the Earth, to develop models we can use to analyze its dynamic behaviour, but to do so, we need to increase our understanding, though examinations like the R. vs. Spencer case, of what questions need to be asked.
( And the bibliography is here... )
