[quote:] Liberal democracy rests on three distinct sets of rights: property rights, political rights, and civil rights. The first set of rights protects owners and investors from expropriation. The second ensures that groups that win electoral contests can assume power and choose policies to their liking - provided these policies do not violate the other two sets of rights. Finally, civil rights guarantee equal treatment before the law and equal access to public services such as education.
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Technology isn't politically neutral. As software engineers and developers we need to be mindful about the potential misuses of the technologies we introduce into the world. In particular, we need to be socially aware of how they can be made to undermine the rights that uphold our societies.
Civil Rights
The social strategies used to maintain or extend existing civil rights (such as public protest) are often protected by the legal systems of our society. Even when such strategies are protected by law, there may still be other political factors which require discretion when implementing such strategies:
- Palantir Knows Everything About You
- A top watchdog investigated 190 cases of alleged retaliation against whistleblowers and found that intelligence bureaucrats only once ruled in favor of the whistleblower
- Coding style can be used to deanonymize programmers from their executable binaries
- People are stashing irrevocable child porn links, dox, copyright infringement, and leaked state secrets in the blockchain
Political Rights
Political rights can be undermined by attacking democratic transparency. Technology in particular has the capacity for scalability, which creates new forms of electoral obfuscation, along with introducing new gaps in electoral accountability:
- Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
- Former top Canadian security officials warn Ottawa to sever links with China’s Huawei