The Berkman Center at Harvard hosted today live webcast by Chris Conley on issues related to transparency and digital surveillance as part of his project on the ethical implications of emerging technologies. Both topics are health care issues as well and I’ve covered them before on this blog in a number of posts. See for example here and here.
A brief description of the webcast lays out the challenge:
Government surveillance of Internet activities - like most law enforcement practices - is designed to prevent harmful activities through two mechanisms: by identifying persons who are planning or are likely to plan such activities, and by discouraging others from joining such groups or planning such activities. In the case of surveillance, these two mechanisms of preventing activity are often perceived as being in conflict: effective surveillance requires secrecy, whereas deterrence requires publicity.
What struck about his presentation was how similar some of his advice is (as to where we go with public disclosure of surveillance practices) to what we hear from health care advocates, that to the extent possible, it must be self-disclosing, conservative, and harmless in-and-of itself.
His presentation is definitely worth a look see.
