Ethics in the Information Age  --  Discussion Project  --  Surveillance and Data-mining

Discuss and try to agree on answers to the following questions:

1.  (Adapted from Sarah Baase, Gift of Fire)  If voter registration records included party identification, and if a small political party opposed an existing law (perhaps they opposed the income tax or the laws against smoking pot), would it be a good idea to let law enforcement agencies use the voter registration data-base to initiate investigations of party members to determine whether or not they were violating the laws their party opposed?  Give reasons both for and against this practice and try to justify your answer.

2.  In 2001 Tampa police used a computer and camera system to scan the faces of all the people attending the Super Bowl.  The system then searched data-bases of criminals, looking for matches.    When ‘matches’ were found, they were checked by a human operator.  This was only a test, and no one was arrested, but 19 wanted criminals were allegedly identified.  Should this technology be used?  (Everywhere?  In certain settings?)  Give reasons both for and against this practice and try to justify your answer.

3.  A March 15, 2012 article in Wired magazine provides new details about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program of warrantless wiretapping.  According to the article any person who communicates with anyone on a list of (millions of) “persons of interest” has all of their electronic communications (telephone and email) recorded and stored in NSA databases.  These are then correlated with credit card records, library records, commuter card (highway) records, Internet search records, etc., all of which is then subject to data-mining.  The official purpose of the program is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, but critics worry about the potential for abuse. (For example, government officials might use the information gathered by the program to track and persecute their political enemies a la Richard Nixon.)  Is this program a good idea?  Give reasons both for and against this practice and try to justify your answer.

4.  Some people have proposed that it would be a good idea to routinely collect DNA samples from everyone (perhaps even at birth) and to construct a national DNA database.  Among other uses, this database would allow law enforcement agencies to identify the ‘owners’ of DNA-containing evidence found at crime scenes.  Is this a good idea?