Jeff Jonas

Responsible Innovation: Evil is as Evil Does

The Fondazione Giannino Bassetti organization recently published “Conversations on Innovation, Power and Responsibility.”  In this document, author Jeff Ubois captured a few of my thoughts in a section entitled: “Applying the UN Declaration of Human Rights” (pp 31-33).   And as related to “is technology good or evil?” I said this:

 

Excerpt: “You probably can’t stop people from doing R&D to see what’s possible. But then how is it going to be deployed, what are its controls, what’s the oversight and accountability? And on and on, a series of checkpoints about how it’s going to be used,” Jonas says. “Until you pair the technology up with the use, you can’t even begin to assess its spectrum of good to evil. You have to go right to a use case and right to a governance model, and then you can start determining where it is going to sit on the spectrum of good versus evil.”

 

The entire publication is available in PDF here.

 

And then, of course, everyone can just change their mind and use something planned for one purpose for an entirely different purpose: A coat hanger to open a car door.

 

RELATED PAPERS: 

 

Giannino Bassetti Foundation: Jeff Ubios

Transparency, Privacy and Responsibility: An Interview with Jeff Jonas 

 

RELATED POSTS: 

Responsible Innovation: Designing for Human Rights

Responsible Innovation: Some Things are Best Left Un-invented

Responsible Innovation: Staying Engaged with the Privacy Community

My Testimony Before The DHS Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee (2005)

The Christmas Day Intelligence Failure – Part III of III: Deadly Transparency

In Part I I boiled down what went wrong.  In Part II I commented on the fix.  And now finally, I think it is important to point out what scares me most.

Sometimes transparency will get you dead.

If you had an arch enemy that was working feverishly to locate and kill you, would you publish your travel schedule, security strengths and weaknesses … down to the hour of the night you will be sleeping and the closest window?

Press accounts like this make me want to throw up.

Excerpt: “About four months before the attempted bombing on December 25, the NSA intercepted telephone conversations in which the leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula talked about the possibility of using an unidentified "Nigerian" bomber in an attack, according to intelligence officials.”

Every al Qaeda operative (big fish or little fish) in the Arabian Peninsula that said anything on the phone about this attack is going to think they were overheard.  As such, they are ALL going to be more careful next time.

Consequences: Bad guys improve their tradecraft.  US intelligence loses signal – going deaf is a bad thing.  Net net, the likelihood of bad things happening in future, without detection, increases.

Well this is just [expletive ending in ‘ing’ omitted] great news … for the enemy!

I am a big fan of transparency, but when it is details from our play book … we are going to have to have some better judgment.

RELATED POSTS:

Transparency, Privacy and Responsibility