Abstract
This article motions to a real contradiction between online security and civil rights. It traverses semantic and conceptual elaborations of both security and human rights, narrowing their range to national security and human rather than civil rights, and suggests that the concept of security itself, whether online or not, is a rhetorical instrument in the hands of interested parties, mostly states and militaries. This instrument is used to undermine human rights precisely by means of its association and even identification with military and national settings. Asking whether the same ethics applies in the case of online security (vs. human rights), our tentative conclusion is that a similar moral determination rules in the case of online security, which may be exponentially more complex, but no less ethically compelling.
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Notes
This instantiation is distinct from, but not unrelated to, a political moral agenda which is not denied, but neither is it necessary for the argument extended here.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), recognized as housing these two families of rights, was subsequently elaborated into two separate, legally recognized treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966 (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 1966 (ICESCR), thereby anchoring those distinctions in international law.
This was, famously, the conflict between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. King’s demands for civil rights from the USA government were countered by Malcolm X’s insistence that the language of human rights was apt and, furthermore, could be more expediently used in addressing international bodies with such demands.
see (Arendt 1973, 293).
The literature on security hosts additional “securities,” such as citizen security, public security, or domestic security (sometimes called public safety). “Citizen security” is itself occasionally termed “public security” or “domestic security” and is defined as “security from crime or interpersonal or social violence” (see Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 2009, 6); the right to citizen security (which is not usually recognized explicitly in international human rights law) is similar to the right to safety. Although each of these can also be analyzed with a view to human rights, our argument here adheres to traditional human rights law and is focused on the tension between national/personal security and human rights.
For a comprehensive yet succinct survey of the international and constitutional definitions of “personal security,” “safety,” and the later evolvement of “human security” see Mattar (2005).
Articles 1 and 2 of the UDHR do not articulate specific rights. They function, somewhat strangely, as both a foundation of the subsequent list of rights (“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…”) and preliminary inclusive and exhaustive legal conditions for that list (“Everyone is entitled… without distinction of any kind…no distinction shall be made on the basis of…).
Human rights as “trumps” are due to Ronald Dworkin (1984).
Precisely because in recent years, and certainly since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, it has become commonplace to situate security and human rights on two sides of a divide, much legal and scholarly work is now being done in order to show how to placate the two, that is to say, in order to show that they do not have to be in conflict. See, e.g., Goold and Lazarus (2007): “…if we are to remain squarely within the liberal democratic tradition, many would argue that security and human rights must be reconciled” (p. 1–2) and Hathaway “Security and Human Rights” http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Faculty/SecurityandHumanRights.pdf (2013): “Indeed, security is not only important in and of itself. Security is also essential to the broad protection of human rights.” . Emblematic of the more practical aspects of this trend is Harvard’s National Security and Human Rights Program which “aims to shape national and international security and human rights policies” in tandem, examining “national security issues through the prism of human rights, weaving humanitarian concerns into the fabric of traditional security studies” (http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/nshr/). I am not unaware of these analyses when I claim, nevertheless, that the common use of security, by both state authorities and public exchange, is what invigorates the danger to human rights from security.
Contextualizing the question this way is important since one can, of course, travel a different route and place human rights under legal or political purviews, thereby becoming mired in the meta-question of the connect—or disconnect—between law and morality or politics and morality.
There is rhetoric involved in naming, as well. The official name in Israeli military documents is “Separation Barrier.” However, one often encounters Israeli media and government using “Security Fence” (to heighten the security element and lessen the “wall”), the Palestinians using “Apartheid Wall” (to focus on its discriminatory impact as a wall), and others variably employing “separation fence,” “anti-terrorist fence,” and “segregation wall.”
In 2004, the International Court of Justice gave an advisory opinion to the effect that the Separation Barrier violates both international human rights law and humanitarian law. Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion July 9, 2004.
Proper disclosure: the author was a member of the board of the organization for many years and its chairperson in 2001–2006.
“Meaning as use” as a label used in the philosophy of language has a sophisticated pedigree: “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning,” it can be defined, thus, the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (Wittgenstein 1953, §43). It has received its untold share of discussion and analysis in the context of theories of meaning. I use it here—rhetorically?—as the expression most conducive to my argument, without delving into or being hindered by its complexity.
“The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose” (Wittgenstein 1953, §127).
Call for Papers for a Special Issue with Ethics and Information Technology on “Ethics of Social Networks for Special Needs Users,” September, 2012, http://philevents.org/event/show/2760.
Some (in)famous examples of such immeasurableness stand out as paradigmatic cases. We hear that the rate of cultural change is such that progress in the twenty-first century will be about 1,000 times greater than that in the twentieth century and are inundated by estimates of the exponential acceleration of chip capacity, network capacity, storage, and processing of information etc., expressed through named laws such as Moore’s Law, Hendy’s Law, Toffler’s Law (of course), Reed’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law, etc. But what do those numbers, trends, and laws mean, and can we really understand them?
This conference took place on June 6, 2012. It is worth noting that the 3rd Annual International Cyber Conference, which took place on June 12, 2013 is identically bifurcated in title between Hebrew and English, with only the English title explicitly saying “Cyber Security Conference.”
http://www.nice.com/transportation/airports, accessed 6.19.2013.
A very different question might address the essentials of such military states and settings, investigating whether authoritarian regimes are necessarily more prone to military fetishism than democratic ones. An ensuing question would also ask whether our modern culture is, in some sense, more militaristic than that of past more traditional societies.
I stress that, on the whole, I do not appraise the hopes and potentialities of digitization negatively; it is only that aspect of digitization which has given rise to a new proficiency of (militaristic) online security that calls here for vigorous critique.
I hasten to qualify these remarks. First, we are in medias res, actually at the first installment of the debate, so assessment of public opinion is scant and hardly reliable. Secondly, in the matter of actual events and their eventual transformations, historical impact is impossible to appraise. I base my evaluation here on emblematic points, such as the prevalence of the pro-security remarks in the media and the minimal number of public representatives in the US Congress who have expressed dismay or even discontent with the violation of rights (as opposed to those, in both media and Congress, who have extolled the open questioning itself), and on hasty ad hoc polls.
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Biletzki, A. Online Security: What’s in a Name?. Philos. Technol. 26, 397–410 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0129-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0129-4