Ethics in Computing Today

1. Ethics in Computing Today Monica Stoica, smonica@cs.bu.edu Boston University http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/14/magazine/14TECHNO.html

2. Office of Homeland Security • the Office of Homeland Security has concluded that the same technologies that were useful before Sept. 11 for tracking, profiling and targeting potential customers can be turned today on potential terrorists. In the wake of the bursting of the tech bubble and in the thick of the war on terrorism, Silicon Valley is reinventing itself as the new headquarters for the military-technological complex.

3. Privacy Concerns Anyone? • As always, the entrepreneurs are following the money. In January, this led them to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest trade show of futuristic gadgets in North America. • After Sept.11, the conference organizers decided to sponsor a special exhibition hall at the Riviera Hotel for technologies that are especially well suited to homeland defense. • That old familiar gold-rush feeling was in the air at the Riviera: one speaker estimated that federal spending on security technologies would grow by 30 percent a year, rising to $62 billion by 2006. • In Las Vegas, several companies predicted that profiling techniques that are now used to detect credit-card fraud could soon be used to detect potential terrorists.

4. Accenture and HNC • A few weeks later, this prediction turned out to be a reality, when The Washington Post reported that the federal aviation authorities and two technology companies called Accenture and HNC Software are planning to test at airports a profiling system designed to analyze each passenger's living arrangements, travel and real-estate history, along with a great deal of demographic, financial and other personal information. • Using data-mining and predictive software, the government then plans to assign each passenger a ''threat index'' based on his or her resemblance to a terrorist profile. Passengers with high threat indexes will be flagged as medium or high risks and will be taken aside for special searches and questioning.

5. Changing Federal laws • Our system ''will check your associates,'' Brett Ogilvie of Accenture told Business Week. • ''It will ask if you have made international phone calls to Afghanistan, taken flying lessons or purchased 1,000 pounds of fertilizer.'' • The only problem: in order for the system to obtain answers to those questions, the nation's privacy laws will need to be relaxed. • Federal laws currently restrict the personally identifiable information that the government can demand from credit-card and phone companies except as part of a specific investigation.

6. Atta • . Investigators will tell you that people who commit credit-card fraud often fit a consistent profile -- using the stolen card to buy gas at self-service stations, for example, and then using it to buy clothes. • By contrast, terrorists don't fit a consistent profile: you're looking for a needle in a haystack, but the color and the shape of the needle keep changing. Mohamed Atta might have been kept out of the country if immigration officials had been aware that there was a warrant for his arrest in Broward County, Florida.

7. But Accenture's profiling system is not designed to check passengers against a watch list of suspected criminals or terrorists. Instead it is designed to compare the purchasing activities and personal behavior of millions of passengers with those exhibited in the past by a tiny group of terrorists -- to create a predictive profile of likely hijackers.

8. Oracle • Oracle, in fact, is the world's largest database manufacturer, and Ellison offered to donate the software for a single national database free of charge to the United States government. (The company, Ellison added, would charge for upgrades and maintenance.)

9. Bio-terrorism • I asked to see an example of Oracle's new homeland-security technology, and I was ushered into a demonstration hall outside the conference room that looked like something out of the last ''Star Wars'' movie. • ''I'll give you an overview of 'Leaders,''' said Brian Jones, then the head of Oracle's health-care consulting unit. ''It stands for Lightweight Epidemiology Advanced Detection and Emergency Response System.'' By collecting health-care information from hospital emergency rooms across the country, Leaders is designed to monitor outbreaks of suspicious diseases and provide early warnings for biological attacks.

10. Oracle • At 9:20 a.m. on Sept. 11, Jones had received a phone call from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which feared that the attack on the twin towers might be followed by a bioterrorism attack. • Working for 10 straight hours, Jones put into his computer the address of every hospital in New York State, to detect unusual disease outbreaks, like smallpox. • ''Every hospital was capable of submitting data to a repository,'' he explained. ''The Centers for Disease Control's experts could sit back in Atlanta and pull up a map just like I'm showing you here.''

11. NY • Jones punched a key and a digital map of New York City appeared on the screen. Using a combination of 7,500 digital photographs and architectural plans of more than 6,000 miles of underground pipes, Oracle has created a detailed map of every building, sewer and water line and curb in the city. By the evening of Sept. 11, Jones was ready to monitor every emergency-room bed in the state.

12. Oracle • Oracle is now working with the federal government to apply the same surveillance system to hospitals throughout the country. • The system would allow hospitals to report incidents of suspicious diseases like anthrax, smallpox and Ebola to a central database. • The program can then send out e-mail or voice-mail alerts to law-enforcement officials if it detects suspicious patterns of diseases anywhere in the country. Steve Cooperman, Oracle's new director of homeland security, said, ''We're going to build a bioterrorism shield, so eventually everyone is going to have to participate -- every hospital, every clinic, every lab.''

13. Oracle • ''The Oracle database is used to keep track of basically everything,'' he said. • ''The information about your banks, your checking balance, your savings balance is stored in an Oracle database. Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo is stored in an Oracle database.'' • Much of the information in these separate commercial databases is also centralized in large databases maintained by credit-card companies like TRW to detect fraud and to decide whether customers should get credit at the mall.

14. Advantages of one database • When it comes to government data, by contrast, there are hundreds of separate, disconnected databases. ''The huge problem is the fragmented data,'' he said. • ''We knew Mohamed Atta was wanted. It's just that we didn't check the right database when he came into the country.'' • Ellison wants to consolidate the hundreds of separate state and federal databases into a single Oracle database, using the centralized credit-card databases as a model.

15. There is no privacy… • ''We already have this large centralized database to keep track of where you work, how much you earn, where your kids go to school, were you late on your last mortgage payment, when's the last time you got a raise,'' he said. • ''Well, my God, there are hundreds of places we have to look to see if you're a security risk.'' • He dismissed the risks of privacy violations: ''I really don't understand. Central databases already exist. Privacy is already gone.''