Struggling with the ethics of cyberspace // TECHNOLOGY: How do you decide what's right or wrong in a world where nothing happens face to face?

DATE                  12/18/93
NEWSPAPER             THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION               NEWS
EDITION               MORNING
PAGE                  a01
STORY LENGTH          23 INCHES
HEADLINE              Struggling with the  ethics of cyberspace // TECHNOLOGY: 
                         How do you decide what's right or wrong in a world 
                         where nothing happens face to face?
BYLINE/CREDIT         DAN FROOMKIN:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS         US:OC:COMPUTERS:COMMUNICATION:ETHICS:REGULATIONS:PRIVACY

      More Americans each day are spending more and more time
  in a land with few laws, no police force or judicial system to
  enforce them anyway, no recognizable community standards, and scant
  few clues to appropriate behavior.
     While it's basically a friendly land offering visitors a vast
  wealth of information and social interaction, it also has its share
  of vandals, voyeurs, impostors, hatemongers and pornographers.
     It's called cyberspace: the land of computer networks ranging
  from your neighbor's computer bulletin board to the worldwide,
  multimillion-user Internet.
     And a lot of people believe that it's about time people agreed
  on some rules for sojourning there.
     This weekend at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of
  Sciences and Engineering, some of the nation's top computer
  scientists, lawyers and sociologists are pondering a host of heady
  high-technology issues.
     At the heart of the matter: How do you define right and wrong in
  a place that doesn't really exist and where nothing is done face to
  face?
     Nobody at the meeting, which continues through Sunday, is
  expecting definitive answers.
     But, "We're not short on questions," said Mark Frankel, an
  officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
  which organized the meeting.
     What are the boundaries of appropriate and inappropriate
  behavior on computer networks, and how can they be regulated?
     How much censorship -- if any -- should there be to keep offensive
  material away from children? And what is offensive material?
     "The question of what is offensive is a community-specific
  judgment," said Rob Kling, computer-science professor at the
  University of California, Irvine. "But what's the community?"
     Should people have a right to cloak their identity on networks?
  Or do people have a greater right to know whom they're
  communicating with?
     Should there be different lanes on the information superhighway?
  Should Internet, the mother of all computer networks, remain the
  anything-goes fast lane? Should there be a  lane for kids?
     What about traffic jams on the information highway?
     What about cyber addiction in the younger generation?
     How private is your electronic mail -- either on national
  networks or in your own office?
     Should E-mail messages between city council members or
  university administrators be considered private and ephemeral? Or
  are they permanent, public records?
     "What's vapor, what's paper?" asked Virginia Rezmierski, an
  admininstrator at the University of Michigan.
     E-mail could never be a place for free expression if it were
  made public, Rezmierski said. "But we also are increasingly using
  it to make decisions."
     Another complicated ethical dilemma is access. Should access to
  the networks remain with only the wealthy and/or the elite?
     Simone Nass, president of the New York-based Society for
  Electronic Access, said some people think being able to get on-line
  is as basic as having a telephone. Others think computer networks
  are luxuries, like glorified fax machines.
     But Nass said she sees networks -- especially the publicly funded
  Internet -- as something else.
     "It's starting to function as a library," she said.
     And how can Americans in good conscience block people from going
  to the public library?
     The number of people on computer networks is expanding almost
  exponentially and likely will continue to accelerate as the Clinton
  administration makes the establishment of an "information
  superhighway" a priority.
     "We're not going to be able to escape the network," Frankel said.
     "These are subtle issues," Kling said. "The moral dimension of
  these issues has not been seriously deliberated before.
     "This is a group which is in a position to determine what are
  plausible policies."