Ethics Newsline®

According to a recent article in the New York Times, if you’re a Microsoft Windows user, chances are about fifty-fifty that you have downloaded “lurkware” that right now is churning away in your machine, collecting data on your surfing habits, adding new bookmarks to your browser, directing you to sites you may not want to visit, and sometimes mimicking the results of your favorite search engine with bogus findings that shepherd you to Web sites looking to boost their click-through ratings.

Sometimes, the software can be downright sinister, hijacking your computer modem to dial an expensive 900 number at your expense or sabotaging your anti-virus program so you can’t get rid of the stuff.

Lurkware programs run the gamut from relatively benign intruders that are often called “adware” to the more intrusive types of “spyware” that can take secret snapshots of your screen and keep track of every keystroke you make surreptitiously emailing the results to the person who planted the spyware.

You can pick up lurkware by clicking on a box agreeing to accept the terms offered for entering a Web site, or by being tricked into downloading a program when attempting to close a pop-up window.

What is particularly alarming from an ethical point of view is that such programs are going mainstream. Major file-sharing utilities routinely install adware on your computer and many corporations use screen-snapshot or key-logger programs to keep tabs on employees’ surfing and work habits. (Incidentally, programs that record screenshots and keystrokes are readily available for download on the Web; software firms don’t ask a lot of questions about who buys them.)

While all lurkware isn’t inherently evil, there are obvious ethical issues attached to installing a program on someone’s computer without the owner’s knowledge or express approval. Of particular interest to the observer of ethics in technology are the climatic conditions of the information age that have created these dilemmas:

• The assumption that because the Internet is the untamed frontier of technology, a Wild West ethic should prevail. We’re very forgiving of the transgressions of digital cowboys. Think of the shoulder shrugging and lack of any meaningful consequences that attended America Online’s sale of computer access that it could not provide. People selling land or stocks that they don’t actually have generally wind up in government accommodations with bars on the windows. But hey — this is the Internet, after all. All is forgiven.
• Our relentless belief that there’s a free lunch, coupled with our ravenous eagerness to partake of it. Businesses that provide file-sharing and other services for “free” make money by gathering and selling data. As long as we expect goods and services to be served up for free on an endless digital cafeteria line, we’re vulnerable to exploitation — and indeed opening the door to it. As PC Magazine pointed out in a cover story about adware and spyware, we pay for everything we get, “but the coin is privacy.”
• A legalistic approach to basic questions of right and wrong on the Internet. When we think in legalistic terms, the question is usually not what’s right, but what we can get away with. Many large-scale Web enterprises post high-sounding privacy policies that contain an awful lot of verbal needle-threading. One, for example, notes in its end-user licensing agreement (EULA) that it pledges to share your personal information only with its employees and the company’s “licensors.” Left unspecified is who those licensors are and how they use the data. Another site actually lards ten EULAs, with screen after screen of fine print, into one acceptance box. Most of us will just click on the “yes” box to end the torment. As the Times noted, “the line between informed consent and naïve clicking can be thin.”

What’s to be done? Legal remedies may be part of the answer. A bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives last July would make certain uses of spyware punishable by jail time. But legislation is an elephant and technology a gazelle; by the time new laws thrash their way though the legislative thicket, technology can evolve in new forms that outdistance the law or simply make it irrelevant.

What’s needed is public discourse that puts such practices squarely in the ethical crosshairs. Consumers can vote with their digital feet by walking away from services that we pay for in the coin of privacy. As painful as it may be, we can read those obscure EULAs. And the business community can make it known — loudly and clearly — that burying abusive practices in contorted fine print is not a good policy. And it’s not a good excuse, either.

(c)2003 Institute for Global Ethics

“‘Parked’ is a bad word to use…. [Kingston] didn’t mean it in that sense.”

– U.S. Army Col. Samuel Taylor, defending an email by Elaine Kingston, comptroller for the Defense Department’s secretive Special Operations Command. Kingston is suspected of helping Defense officials hide $20 million from congressional auditors. Kingston, who investigators believe was initially asked to hide $40 million, said her budget could only accommodate $20 million without raising red flags. “They needed an answer in five minutes,” Kingston later wrote in an email reportedly obtained by Florida’s St. Petersburg Times. “The agency they had parked it with had a problem and they couldn’t do it,” she added. The House Appropriations Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and the Pentagon’s internal auditor have launched separate inquiries following a phoned-in hotline complaint last summer, reported the Washington Post. (“Pentagon Investigates Movement of Funds,” Washington Post, Sep. 30)

WASHINGTON
Syndicated columnist Robert Novak last week defended his decision to reveal the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, the wife of a former U.S. ambassador who has criticized President Bush’s use of faulty intelligence data in the build-up to the Iraqi war.

Novak outed Plame in a July 14 column, eight days after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, published a New York Times opinion piece criticizing the president’s use of bad intelligence.

Wilson faulted Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech, in which the president touted allegations that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa — charges that Wilson had officially investigated and discredited, reported ABC News.

After the Times piece was published, Novak was told by unnamed “senior administration officials” about Plame, he said. Although the CIA asked Novak to not publish her name, he did so anyway, noted CNN.

“The CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson’s wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else,” Novak wrote in a column published last week, adding that Plame’s role with the CIA “was not much of a secret” anyway.

Chicago Sun-Times editor Steve Huntley last week defended Novak’s decision as good journalism. “Our job, my job, your job, Bob Novak’s job, is to report the news, not to slam the door on it,” he told CNN.

Washington Post media analyst Howard Kurtz last week said Novak’s decision was ethically murky at best, suggesting that Novak had been lulled into playing political payback for Wilson’s opinion piece.

“It’s hard for me to understand what the argument is on the [side of revealing Plame's name], why this information was so important that it needed to be published,” Kurtz told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

The U.S. Justice Department has launched a probe into who revealed Plame’s identity to Novak and several other columnists and reporters. Such actions constitute a felony only if those doing the outing are aware that the CIA agent is undercover. Some of the contacted journalists refused to reveal Plame’s name.

Some lawmakers and nearly 70 percent of the public polled last week said the investigation should be handled by an independent counsel due to possible conflicts of interest at the Justice Department. The Post noted that Justice head John Ashcroft is a Bush appointee as well as a longtime ally of Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political strategist and one of those suspected of initiating the leak.

The White House has called such suspicions “ridiculous.”

WASHINGTON
Reversing its analysis from a year ago, the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last week released a report concluding that the financial benefits of environmental regulations far outweigh their costs.

Last year, the OMB, which annually assesses the cost-benefit trade-offs of the nation’s laws, said that when it comes to environmental laws, the costs and savings amount to a zero-sum game, reported the Washington Post.

Last week, the OMB reversed that assessment, saying its previous calculations were wrong because they underestimated the benefits of laws governing ozone and particulate matter in the air — frequent factors in heart and lung disease.

The new OMB figures find that the savings — in reduced health care costs, hospital visits, premature deaths, and lost job productivity — over the past decade were five to seven times higher than the costs to industry and government.

The report found that savings resulting from environmental laws amounted to $120 billion to $193 billion. Costs to industry, states, and municipalities, weighed in at $23 billion to $26 billion, reported the Post.

Jeffrey Marks of the National Association of Manufacturers was skeptical of the figures, arguing that the government “has traditionally underestimated the costs of regulations on industry.”

Kevin Curtis of the National Environmental Trust applauded the OMB report.

“The bottom line is that the benefits from major environmental rules over the past 10 years were (five to seven) times greater than the costs,” Curtis told the Post, even though critics blame “And that’s a number that can’t be ignored.”

CONCORD, New Hampshire
In a decision that runs contrary to both the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous state high courts, the New Hampshire Supreme Court last week ruled that trash, even when left on the curb for pick up, is entitled to privacy protection.

In the 4-to-1 decision, the court held that New Hampshire’s state constitution provides greater privacy protection than does the U.S. Constitution.

According to the Associated Press, the case stems from a search of a man’s trash, without a warrant, that helped lead to a search warrant and eventually an arrest on drug charges. The man, John Goss, sued the police department, claiming the search was illegal.

The court agreed and remanded the case back to the lower court to determine whether a search warrant would have been issued without evidence obtained from the man’s trash.

CBS News reported that Justice Joseph Nadeau, who voted in the majority, wrote: “Personal letters, bills, receipts, prescription bottles, and similar items that are regularly disposed of in household trash disclose information about the resident that few people would want to be made public. Nor do we believe that people voluntarily expose such information to the public when they leave trash, in sealed bags, out for regular collection.”

The lone dissenter, Justice John Broderick, cited a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, according to the AP, “that it was unreasonable for people to expect their trash to remain private, given that ‘plastic garbage bags left on or at the side of a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public.’”

NAIROBI
Kenya’s justice system is rife with corruption, fraud, and unethical conduct, with half of the nation’s judges and magistrates compromised, an independent panel reported last week, urging reforms.

The Integrity and Anti-Corruption Committee of Kenya, commissioned by the country’s chief justice, said the panel’s probe had found evidence of extensive fraud and wrongdoing, reported the BBC.

Those implicated include 152 of Kenya’s 300 judges and magistrates, five of the nine Appeal Court judges, and 18 of the 36 High Court judges.

“Corruption has resulted in a loss of confidence in the judiciary as an institution,” warned Justice Aaron Ringera, who headed the probe at the request of Chief Justice Evans Gicheru.

Ringera’s report identified widespread corruption, including cash bribes, sexual favors, free gifts, financial fraud, document doctoring, stolen evidence, and unfounded promotions, reported allAfrica.com.

Chief Justice Evans Gicheru promised a crackdown. “This is a battle we’re going to fight without looking backward. We are going to mount this beast and wrestle it to the ground,” Gicheru pledged last week.

Since taking his post in March, Gicheru has forced out 10 magistrates and more than 50 court clerks and judicial staff over corruption charges, reported the BBC.

The panel’s report recommends a tighter watch on judicial personnel, including putting records on computer and requiring staff to provide annual financial disclosure statements, noted allAfrica.com.

NEW YORK
The American Stock Exchange (Amex) has deliberately failed to ensure the integrity of its transactions, willfully breaching customers’ rights and lying about it to investigators, the federal government charged in a scathing report disclosed last week by Bloomberg News.

The report, written by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), blasts the Amex for poor governance, for failing to detect many instances of brokers failing to make good on quoted prices, and for using “illogical procedures and indefensible rule interpretations” to disguise the problems.

From poor board supervision to lax disciplinary measures, the “Amex’s lack of commitment toward its regulatory obligations” is evident, SEC staff examiners charged in a 32-page report obtained by Bloomberg.

The Amex was ordered to adopt reforms in September 2000 after brokers charged that the exchange — the nation’s third largest — was ignoring some customer orders, blocking valid trades, and cheating on prices.

The promised changes have fallen far short and been undermined by a “deliberate attempt to conceal serious deficiencies,” the SEC says in the report, which said that the targeted practices appear to have continued.

The SEC said criminal charges may be filed to punish the Amex for filing a fraudulent document to hide its lack of internal vigilance and control measures.

Amex spokesman Robert Rendine said the exchange is “cooperating fully with the SEC.”

“There’s increasing skepticism that the industry is able to regulate itself,” Southern Methodist University law professor Alan Bromberg told Bloomberg. “Pressure is building for change in the way the markets function and who regulates them.”

In related news, the Amex and three other options markets settled a lawsuit filed by three traders who accused the exchanges of changing prices, voiding confirmed trades, and refusing to process transactions — the same practices alleged by the recent SEC report.

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, reported Bloomberg.

BOSTON
Prudential Securities last week cut loose 12 brokers, including five Boston brokers and their manager, over concerns that the employees had been engaging in market timing on behalf of large clients.

Among those whose resignations were requested was Martin Druffner, 34, one of Prudential’s top performers, both locally and nationally, with $1.7 million in commissions in 2001, reported the Boston Globe.

“While they believe they adhered to company policies at all times, they have accepted this decision and have left the company,” the Boston brokers’ lawyer, Michael Collora, told the Globe.

The oustings — of the six brokers in Boston, a branch manager in New York, and five brokers elsewhere — follow allegations of widespread abuses by brokerage houses trading in mutual funds.

New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer turned the spotlight on those alleged abuses last month, stealing the thunder of federal and state regulators, who also have turned a suspicious eye on brokerage houses.

Prudential has come under the gaze of parent company Wachovia, the Massachusetts Securities Division, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the National Association of Securities Dealers, reported the Globe.

Last week’s actions followed internal suspicions that Prudential’s Boston office had been engaging in market timing — a frowned-upon practice of late-day buying designed to capitalize on the market’s post-close news.

Current and former Prudential workers have indicated that market timing “is routine and wide in scope” at the Boston office, according to the Massachusetts Securities Division and the Globe report.

Wachovia spokesman Tony Mattera last week said the firm was taking steps to make sure any abuses were stopped. “Wachovia’s top priority is in ensuring our clients can put their full trust and confidence in our financial advisers,” he said.

While brokerages often have policies against market timing, some are suspected of continuing to allow lucrative institutional investors to engage in the practice in exchange for a cut of the profits or commissions. Market timing adds often-unseen costs to managing large portfolios, cutting into profit margins and costing average investors roughly $5 billion a year, Stanford economics professor Eric Zitzewitz told the Globe.

PHILADELPHIA
Political commentator Rush Limbaugh hung up his ESPN hat last week, resigning from his pregame commentator role after making controversial remarks about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb.

McNabb, a long-lauded black quarterback, has begun poorly this season, leading some — including Limbaugh, on ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown” — to question how much he deserves his past publicity.

“I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well,” Limbaugh said on ESPN’s Sep. 28 pregame show. “There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.”

The remarks, which went unchallenged by Limbaugh’s fellow ESPN commentators, two of whom are black, caught headlines and led to Limbaugh’s eventual decision to resign.

While Limbaugh says race had nothing to do with his comments, many disagree — McNabb among them.

Last week, McNabb said he did not mind Limbaugh’s criticism of his performance as quarterback, reported the Associated Press. What bothered him was the allusion to skin color — and ESPN’s lack of reaction.

“I’m not pointing at anyone but someone should have” challenged the comment, McNabb told the AP. “I wouldn’t have cared if it was the cameraman.”

Saying he worried about the impact of Limbaugh’s remarks on other black athletes, fans, and kids looking to make it big in the big leagues, McNabb said he does not need an apology from Limbaugh.

“What is that going to do? You’ve already said it. You’ve thought about it, so you had time to think about it before you said it,” he told CNN. “It’s not really over. But there’s nothing you can do to change it.”

In the game that followed Limbaugh’s comments, McNabb led the Eagles to a 23-13 victory over the Buffalo Bills.

CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina
Students from financially strapped families got a boost last week from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which pledged to begin paying the full education costs for poor students.

The ground-breaking plan is believed to be the first of its kind at a U.S. public university, and follows a similar move by the private Ivy League school Princeton in 2001, reported the New York Times.

Chapel Hill chancellor James Moeser announced the plan last week, saying it is “an expression of our values at this university.”

The new policy calls on UNC-Chapel Hill to pay the full education costs — roughly $13,000 for state residents, $25,000 for out-of-staters — for students whose parents earn less than 150 percent of the poverty level. For a family of four, that comes to $28,000, according to the Times.

The university expects to pay up to $1.38 million a year to underwrite such students, with half of the funds coming from the students’ work-study programs, which will require them to work 10 to 12 hours a week.

The university’s move was widely welcomed as an important way to get low-income students into the nation’s universities, where the price tag has risen more than 200 percent since 1981 — far higher than the 80-percent rise in the inflation index over the same period, noted the Washington Post.

“Our clear message is that there are no financial barriers” to attending UNC-Chapel Hill, Moeser said. “College should be possible for everyone who can make the grade, regardless of family income.”

The UNC-Chapel Hill policy will begin taking effect with next year’s freshman class, with a full phase-in within four years, noted the Post.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

OTTAWA
Canada last week became the first of the richest industrialized countries in the G8 to promise to change its patent laws to allow generic drug makers to manufacture low-cost AIDS and other vital drugs for export to poor countries that cannot afford the more expensive brand-name drugs.

This move would be one of the first responses by a Western government to the Word Trade Organization agreement in August to allow access by poorer countries to patented drugs for health emergencies.

To the surprise of many, the association that promotes the interest of the Canadian brand-name multinational drug companies, Canada’s Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies, has supported the government’s move by stating that Canada “has an opportunity to show international leadership by changing patent laws to improve access to the drugs.”

The support by both the Canadian government and the country’s brand-name drug manufacturers has been hailed as very significant by the United Nations and advocacy groups around the world lobbying for access by the world’s poor to desperately needed drugs.

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky
The city of Louisville’s local Salvation Army chapter last week scrapped a new policy that called on homeless families to ante up $5 per night if they stayed at the shelter for more than a week.

The fee, adopted at the start of September, was devised as a bid to push homeless people toward self-sufficiency, Maj. John Tolan, the agency’s director of social services, told the Associated Press.

While the Louisville shelter has been facing tough economic times, laying off 12 staff this year, Tolan said the $5 fee was not an attempt to help fill the group’s financial holes.

Instead, Tolan said, it was part of a larger program, including meetings with counselors, that aimed to get people off the streets, out of the shelter, and into residences of their own.

After the $5 fee made news last week, local Salvation Army director Maj. Todd Hawks rescinded the policy for families, calling it “ill-advised.” The same policy still applies to individuals who stay more than seven nights.

While the national Salvation Army does not encourage fee-based services, it allows local chapters to set their own prices and policies on the matter, according to the AP.

Though most shelters still do not charge such fees, tough economic times and social policies are prodding a growing number to consider the charges. “I would say it’s a growing trend,” Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, told the AP.

From the Families and Work Institute:

“A new study released today, ‘Highlights of The 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce’ from Families and Work Institute, finds large-scale transformations taking place in the work and home lives of American men and women.

“Among the study’s key findings:

“Today, women are more likely to work as managers or professionals than men (38 percent of women versus 28 percent of men), and are better educated, with 62 percent of women versus 56 percent of men having completed 4-year college or some post-secondary education.

“Fathers in dual-earner couples today spend 42 minutes more doing household chores on workdays than fathers in 1977. Mothers have reduced their time by approximately the same amount. So the combined time that spouses in dual-earner couples with children spend on household chores has not changed over 25 years — what has changed is how family work is divided.

“Employees with families report significantly higher levels of interference between their jobs and their family lives than employees 25 years ago (45 percent vs. 34 percent report this ’some’ or ‘a lot’). And men with families report higher levels of interference between their jobs and their family lives than women in the same situation….

“Flexible work arrangements are found to provide significant benefits to both employees and employers. Workers who have more access to flexible work arrangements report significantly better mental health than other employees, and are more likely to be committed to their employers and to plan to stay at their current company.

“‘U.S. employers are changing in response to the new demographics of the workplace, but families are changing even more, especially men,’ says Ellen Galinsky, president of Families and Work Institute and a co-author of the ‘National Study of the Changing Workforce.’…

“The five topics explored in depth in the National Study of the Changing Workforce include: Women in the Workforce, Dual Earner Couples, The Role of Technology in Employees’ Lives On and Off the Job, Work-Life Supports On the Job, and Working for Oneself versus Someone Else….”

“Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (U.S. essayist and poet, 1803-1882)