Lecture with slides and audio by Prof. Tim Unwin of the ICT4D consortium on ICTs, Citizens, the State and their relationship to moral philosophy and development Presented during the first session of the Collaborative Online Seminar Cours in ICT4D on the 10th of November 2009

1. ICTs, citizens and the state: moral
philosophy and development practices
Tim Unwin
UNESCO Chair in ICT4D
Royal Holloway, University of London
ICT4D Consortium Online Seminar Series, 2009

2. Is the introduction of e-
government initiatives in
‘developing’ countries a ‘good’
thing?

3. On what grounds do we make
such judgements?
• Costs and benefits
– Makes government delivery cheaper
• Efficiency
– Enables government business to be
transacted more efficiently
• Transparency
– Reduces corruption and wastage in the
system
• Arguments generally made primarily
on economic grounds

4. But is the introduction of ICTs
in e-governance ‘right’ or
‘wrong’?
How does moral philosophy help
us answer this question?

5. Posted on Kictanet (2009)
‘...Pakistan has created a national smart ID card database,
managed by the National Database and Registration
Authority (NADRA). Currently this database holds 170
million fingerprints, 72 million facial images, and has already
issued 70 million ID cards. … The mere scale of this
database raises questions about access management,
security, and interoperability, but these have yet to be
answered. A centralised pool of information may be an
invaluable tool to any government; especially one trying to
raise its people out of poverty. But given how high the
stakes are, we need to ask ourselves whether adopting a
one-sided approach and focusing on the benefits alone will
not harm those same people in the long run’?

6. The example of national digital
databases
Positive and negative impacts on
both citizens and states

7. Positive benefits of national
databases
• For governments • For citizens
– enables easier checking – Enables swifter access to
of individual identities information
– cheaper delivery of – Facilitates agencies in
services accessing their life
– Increased efficiency of histories for medical
managing citizen control reasons
– reduces ‘illegal’ – Individual benefits (in
immigration terms of financial/tax and
– Centralises diverse personal safety) gained
sources of existing from government delivery
information of more efficient and cost
effective services
– reduces numbers of civil
servants

8. But also negative impacts of
national digital databases
• For governments • For citizens
– Costs of – Should states have biometric
information about citizens?
implementation and
– Identity only proven through
management the presence of the ID card
– Potential failure of – Increases the potential of
untried technologies identify fraud
– Risks of fraudulent – Ultimately, citizens have to
use of counterfeit ID pay for ID cards
cards, as with – Increases potential for
citizens to be subject to acts
banknotes and of violence against them by
passports states or agencies thereof
– Increases potential for
identity theft

9. How do we decide what is
right and wrong in this
example?
… especially in contexts where
governments are not trusted

10. Outline
• The Information Society, WSIS
and human rights
• African information ethics and the
Tshwane Declaration
• E-government and changes in the
relationships between states and
citizens
• Questions we need to ask about
e-government to inform us
whether it is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’

11. Drawing on
• 17th century European social contract theory
– Especially Locke and Hobbes
• Recent work in Information Ethics in an
African context
– Typified by Capurro et al. (2007)
– And debates over the Tshwane Declaration
• Critical realism
– Raymond Geuss’s (2008) Philosophy and Real
Politics
• Popular debates on identity cards, national
databases and surveillance

12. Towards conclusions
• In each particular ‘real’ context
we need to ask three types of
question about
– Trust
– Privacy
– The system of law
• And we need to rethink our taken
for granted assumptions about
‘human rights’

13. The Information Society and
WSIS
‘We acknowledge the
importance of ethics for the
Information Society, which
should foster justice, and the
dignity and worth of the human
person. The widest possible
protection should be accorded
to the family and to enable it to
play its crucial role in society’
(WSIS, 2003, para 57).

14. The Information Society and
WSIS
• Nowhere does this make explicit what is
meant by “ethics for the Information Society”
• Interesting emphasis placed on the family
– How does this relate to the Information Society?
• WSIS (2005) reaffirmed interest
– To “address the ethical dimensions of the
Information Society”
– With emphasis on the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
• “so that people everywhere can create, access, utilize
and share information and knowledge, to achieve their
full potential and to attain the internationally agreed
development goals and objectives”

15. Focus on Human Rights
• WSIS claims are an ideal aspiration
– Premised on the Universal Declaration
• But do not reflect current reality
– Especially in Africa
• Contested nature of human rights is
not recognised
– ICTs have enabled powerful interests
to assert their vision of human rights
• US dominated model focusing on the
individual as a ‘free’ labourer and consumer
– But this is not necessarily in the
interest of poor and marginalised
peoples

16. African information ethics

17. African Information Ethics…
• Ethical considerations are essential so as to
avoid an increased digital information gap in
Africa
• Distinction
– Information ethics for Africa
• The dominant modality, imposed from outside
– Information ethics from Africa
• Importance of African traditions in shaping
African information ethics (Capurro, 2007)
– Oral traditions
– Communal traditions (ubuntu)
• Perhaps European privacy concerns are less relevant?

18. …Tshwane Declaration
• But, failures of the political process (Frohmann, 2007)
• ‘African information ethics is treated as a plug-in to a
system of stable phenomena already assembled
together in a fixed totality by’ the ‘three absolute and
already stabilized virtues’ of universal human values,
human rights and social justice
• ‘the Declaration reflects the political reality of the
Tshwane Conference, where instead of pursuing
scholarly discussion of ethics in any philosophical
sense the academic delegates were set the task of
crafting a document – the Tshwane Declaration –
only to find that none of their recommendations
survived the final draft’

19. National ID cards: an example
of e-government

20. Ghana’s National Identification
Authority
• 2. Q. How does the NIS benefit Ghana?
– A. The NIS will facilitate:
• development planning based on sufficient accurate population
data. This will boost comprehensive national planning,
especially in sectors such as education, health, employment
and infrastructure;
• delivery of social services such as health, retirement benefits
and social administration;
• delivery of credit facilities; and
• identification of individuals for voting, insurance, licensing and
general national security purposes.
• 15. Q. What information will the ID Card bear?
– A. The card will bear the holder’s unique identification
number (assigned to him/her for life), name, photograph,
fingerprint and residential/ home address.

21. “How brokers mint millions in
Kenya ID fraud”
http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/561348/-/item/2/-/9575rbz/-/index.html

22. Positive benefits of biometric
ID cards
• For governments • For citizens
– Helps to guarantee – Simplifies proof of
transparency and identity for purposes
reliability of electoral such as banking, health,
processes insurance
– Prevents illegal activities – Reduces identity fraud
and threats (claims that it – Enables foreign national
reduces terrorism, illegal working in a state to have
immigration, under-age proof of identity
drinking and criminal – Facilitating travel to other
activity) states that recognise the
– Increases ability to identity card
monitor movement of
citizens

23. But also negative impacts of
biometric ID cards
• For governments • For citizens
– Costs of implementation – States do not currently have the
right to have access to
and management biometric information about
– Potential failure of untried citizens; why should they?
technologies – Makes identity only proven
through the presence of the ID
– Risks of fraudulent use of card, rather than through trust
counterfeit ID cards, as in physical person
with banknotes and – Increases the potential of
passports identify fraud
– Ultimately, citizens have to pay
for ID cards
– Increases potential for citizens
to be subject to acts of violence
against them by states or
agencies thereof

24. http://www.wholetruthcoalition.org

25. Three key moral issues need to
be explored in choosing between
‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in e-
Government: trust, privacy and
the law
Each within
locally specific
contexts

26. Origins of Social Contract
theory
• 17th century Europe
– Hobbes: Leviathan
– Locke: Two treatises of government
• People have rights that they give up to
governments in return for protection
(Hobbes)
– Reconciling conflicting human desires for
peace and power
• They also have duties to replace
corrupt governments (Locke)
• But, do people actually have rights that
they can cede to governments?

27. Trust
• Trust often seen as the basis for effective
human cooperation
– Underlying importance of regulatory environments
in business and government
– Yet 2008 financial meltdown has been a challenge
to ‘trust’
• Trust and ICTs - Gerck (1998)
– ‘trust is that which is essential to a communication
channel but cannot be transferred from a source to
a destination using that channel’
• Surveillance suggests that governments do
not trust citizens
– Why should citizens trust governments?

28. Trust and e-Government
• Three key issues
– Where citizens do not trust governments, no
amount of e-government will encourage the
delivery of better governance
– the use of digital technologies may actually
be reducing the trust between citizens and
governments rather than increasing it as
intended and expected
– No amount of e-government technology will
actually make a government change its
attitudes and approaches towards its
citizens, unless that government has in the
first instance decided to adopt new ethical
stances towards concepts such as
transparency, equity and fairness

29. Privacy
• Privacy as a good that can be weighed up
against other goods (Etzioni, 2005)
– Governments can pry into individuals’ lives to protect all
citizens
– External circumstances must change to permit this
• Use of ‘terrorism’ as a justification
• Or privacy as a means through which we
have power over our own lives
– But assymetric power relationships between states and
citizens: states have more power than individual citizens
• What if states cannot be trusted to be good?
– ‘Reducing government’s ability to do bad things to us, at the
cost of limiting its ability to protect us from bad things done
to us by ourselves or by other people, may not be such a
bad deal’ (Friedman, 2005)

30. Freedom on the Net (2009)

31. Privacy and e-Government
• A fully transparent society (Brin, 1998)
– Governments can watch citizens
– And citizens can watch governments
– But this is an idealistic view
• Three key questions:
– Will citizens ultimately benefit by giving up
privacy rights to the state?
– Do governments have in place
mechanisms to avoid abuse of formerly
‘private’ information?
– Do overall communal benefits outweigh
losses of individual freedoms?

32. Ethics and legal systems
• Locke’s fundamental constitutional principle
– the individual can do anything apart from that
which is prohibited by law, whereas the state may
only do things that are explicitly authorised by law
• Important differences between systems of
Common Law and Constitutional Law
– Distinctions between existing practices and
constitutional principles
– Separation between legislature and government
– Challenges in reaching international agreements

33. The Law and e-Government
• Three challenges
– Technological innovation faster than ability of legal
systems to respond
– ICTs and globalisation leads to need for
international agreements that are difficult to forge
• All too often resorting to Human Rights agendas
– Legality of ICTS
• If some use of ICTs has not yet been defined as illegal,
citizens are allowed to act with impunity
• yet states should have to seek authorisation from the
courts to be able to implement a new ICT based
initiative, such as the construction of a national database
of citizen information

34. Conclusions
• Challenges for human rights
agendas and social contract theory
– If people do not have rights that they
can cede to governments,
governments cannot claim legitimacy
in using biodata
– Need for a focus on responsibilities to
balance hegemonic focus on rights
• Importance of consideration of
communities, not only individuals
– And importance of African communal
traditions in particular

35. Who really benefits from e-
Government?
• Some benefits for citizens
• Considerable increase in the
power of states
– Despite anarchic potential of
some ICT usage
• But the biggest beneficiaries
are those corporations selling
and implementing the
technologies

36. Is e-government ‘right’ or
‘wrong’?
…in your
contexts

37. Keeping in touch….
http://www.ict4d.org.uk
http://ict4dconsortium.rhul.ac.uk/elgg