A Question (or two) of Ethics (part 1)

A couple of thorny ethical questions have raised their head recently, and like most of these things, figuring out what's the "right" thing to do has not been easy.

The first situation came out of an interview. It's a classic problem - one that I've heard asked as a hypothetical "what would you do?" in interviews for a management post - but it does happen, and it happened to us.

We've been searching high and low for a damn good sysadmin, without much success, for months. We finally found a candidate with all the skills and a great attitude, he would have been absolutely perfect for us...  there was just one small niggle - in his younger days, he'd hacked into a major credit card provider. Not just for a look-see, either, he actually figured out a way to use people's credit card numbers without their accounts being charged, and used it.

He didn't really know how much he took in total, but in the end he turned himself in, and did hard time for it. Now a completely reformed character, he was looking for a job that used his obviously abundant skills in a positive way.

To his credit, he was very open about this, and he talked quite freely about it. We really liked him, and we were satisfied that he wouldn't be a security problem. However, then there's the matter of our customers.....

We do work for some pretty security-conscious clients. Some of them have US Top Secret classified projects. Although we were quite happy that this guy wouldn't be a security risk, would they be? We're a small startup, battling for contracts along with the rest, and it's hard enough at times to get big corporations to take you at all seriously even at the moment. Anyone who has ever jumped through the zillion flaming hoops that they put you through in order to get a whiff of business from these kinds of companies knows just how insane their security procedures can be. (I'm still smiling at the badge I had to wear on one site visit recently - big bold capital letters, red font - "FOREIGN PERSON! ESCORT REQUIRED!") If one of them got wind of us having a genuine time-served cracker working for us, we'd be dead in the water.

In the end we had to make the uncomfortable decision that we couldn't hire this guy, despite him being one of the best candidates we've had. We're still looking for a suitable sysadmin.

That was a few months ago. The second incident is much more recent - yesterday, in fact - and quite similar, it's kind of approaching the same question of reform and change, but from an opposite direction. Mind you, this post has gotten quite long, so I'll put that in a post of it's own.

Astroturfing in action : social media manipulation exchange

"Astroturfing" is the art of faking "grassroots" - social media manipulation, in other words.

And here is where you can buy, sell, or exchange Diggs, Stumbles, Reddits, blog posts, reviews, you name it....

Anti-Social Social Software - How far is Too Far?

The social software revolution has been, more or less, about openness. Transparency and freedom have been the order of the day. "Information wants to be free!" goes the mantra, and by and large it's hard to argue against it. All kinds of information that has always been publically available is becoming gathered together, cross referenced and made searchable by the new wave of social software mashups and visualisations, and those who expressed doubt or indignation about this approach have been dismissed as relics of a bygone era, who "just don't get it".

(I'm including myself in this, by the way. Trampoline's Enron Explorer is a perfect case in point. The information was already public domain, and we weren't even the first to visualise it - we just put a Web 2.0 face on it, and got lucky with the timing.)

But now and again there comes an application of this philosophy that makes me wonder how far is too far? Enter the charmingly named www.whosarat.com.

According to the New York Times:

The site was started by Sean Bucci in 2004, after he was indicted in federal court in Boston on marijuana charges based on information from an informant.

Initially free, it now charges charges between $7.99 for a week and $89.99 for life. You don't have to be as cynical as me to take a guess as to the kind of people who will happily pay to see names and mugshots of the 4,300 informers and 400 undercover agents that the site says it has identified.

So is this too far?
Is it possible to define a clear moral line between a "good" use of public-domain data and "bad" ? Even if it is possible, should we?
Should some usages be permitted but not others? How do we tell the difference?

What is it that actually makes me uneasy about this?

The trouble is that any time you actually try to define what's acceptable and what isn't, in clear unambiguous language, you can always find a counter-example that destroys your mental partitioning of the world and means you have to start again.

The only way I can put my finger on what bothers me about the site is to refer to the intent behind it. Where the intent behind a mashup like Chicago Crime could reasonably be argued to be beneficial to society in some way, Who's A Rat is clearly not.

But even that definition is full of ambiguity. Who's A Rat may well be of immense benefit to certain segments of society (Hal Helms' "Vinny" persona, for one) and Chicago Crime could be argued to be detrimental to, say, property owners in high-crime areas who are looking to sell.

I guess the hoary old cliche applies just as much to information as to people : with great freedom comes great responsibility. We can't on the one hand argue that information needs to be free, yet on the other hand argue that it can only be free for usages that we like. Either the information is out there or it isn't, and I guess that if we want to gain the benefits of information freedom, we have to be prepared to tolerate the drawbacks.