What Should Be In a Technology Bill of Rights?

snydeq writes "The Deep End's Paul Venezia argues in favor of the creation of a Technology Bill of Rights to protect individuals against malfeasance, tyranny, and exploitation in an increasingly technological age. Venezia's initial six proposed articles center on anonymity rights, net neutrality, the open-sourcing of law enforcement software and hardware, and the like. What sort of efficacy do you see such a document having, and in an ideal world, which articles do you see as imperative for inclusion in a Technology Bill of Rights?"

Comments

Inalienable Rights

[Bigjeff5]

Replying more to all the repliers above me than the parent: you people are completely misunderstanding what was meant by "inalienable rights".

It does NOT mean that it is impossible to infringe on "inalienable rights". What it means is that there are a set of basic rights that apply to all human beings. They are "inalienable" because we desearve these rights by our very existance. However, just because they exist does not make them un-infringeable. What the constitution did by spelling those rights out in the Bill of Rights was make a promise that the US government would not infringe on those 10 basic rights.

The system for discovering violations of these rights tends to be slow, since the government is large and things tend to escape notice for a while or simply take time to become sizeable enough to be noticed. However despite it's slow nature (or perhaps because of it?) the system is very effective, and we have essentially the same freedoms - more in some ways, in fact - that we had at the nation's founding.

Our system was designed around protecting these basic, inalienable rights. Even if the mightiest of the mighty in this land - our elected officials, president, and SCOTUS - manage to screw up the Bill of Rights, there is always a do-over. Laws are constantly neutered or bolstered by the courts, SCOTUS decisions can and have been overturned by other SCOTUS decisions, Amendments to the Constitution can and have been supplanted by new amendments, and the President can and has been impeached.

All this to protect our basic human rights (plus others, sure).

That said, the promise (i.e. the Constitution) was not made to non-US citizens and so US actions outside the US territory are often ignored, and the oppression of other people is always ignored unless it somehow represents a direct threat to the freedom of US citizens.

That's just the way it goes.