Maybe it’s inevitable that the Information Age, having brought amazing technological benefits, should also create astonishing ethical problems. Another one surfaced last weekend, when congressional Democrats called for an investigation into an apparent info-squelch by the Bush administration.

The issue goes back to last fall’s contentious debate on Medicare. On December 8, President Bush signed a new Medicare law, but only after the administration had assured Congress that the costs would not exceed $400 billion over ten years. On January 29, however, the White House announced that the price could actually be $534 billion.

Now comes word from Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard S. Foster, that his own estimates had put the costs at between $500 billion and $600 billion — and that he was threatened with termination by his superiors if he dared to share that estimate with Congress.

If true, that’s egregious. Democracy depends on the free flow of information. Yet in an odd way it’s unsurprising. The central issue here is not simply Medicare. It is whether the nation is getting and using the information it needs — whether, in fact, information is being handled honestly and accurately.

That’s the issue, after all, that plagues the intelligence community here and in Britain over last year’s statements concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But it’s not a partisan problem: Remember that the same challenge plagued the Clinton administration as well, causing highly respected Cabinet members to affirm publicly — based, it turns out, on deceptive information — that the president had no sexual relationships with Monica Lewinsky.

The need for an information ethic goes well beyond politics. What landed Martha Stewart in trouble? Insider trading — the illegal use of privileged information — and the attempt to cover up that use. Of what does Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling stand accused? Insider trading, enriching himself because he knew what the public did not. How did WorldCom’s former CEO, Bernard Ebbers, amass his personal wealth? By spinning a tissue of deceit to hide the financial condition of his company.

Nor are the watchdogs exempt. Consider the wholesale fabrications of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair last May. Having resigned from the Times, he’s back in public again with his hastily assembled book, Burning Down My Master’s House: My Life at the New York Times — which seems to conflate career-ending fraud and factual deceit with mere movie-of-the-week antics.

The Information Age has made one thing apparent: Information, more than ever, has immense power. In general, the public is clear that power, wielded unethically, produces enormous evils. It is less clear that information can have disastrous consequences. We have a ready supply of terms — fibbing, stretching the truth, telling little white lies — meant to soften the consequences of dishonesty. The fact that we have no similar supply of palliatives on the power side of the equation — nobody talks about “little white tyrants” — suggests we’re clearer about the dangers of corrupted power than of perverted information.

That needs to change. We need an Information Ethic. It should be rooted in the five core moral values that, as this column has noted so often, are found in every culture where we’ve done the research: honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion. Obviously an Information Ethic needs to center on honesty and truth telling. But as the examples above make clear, being accurate and candid may not be enough. Needed, in addition, is:

• A proactive sense of responsibility in dealing with information, ensuring that it gets where it needs to go and is defended from distribution to those who shouldn’t have it.
• A respect for the power of information, as well as a humility in the presence of knowledge far larger than any single individual.
• A fairness that is deliberately blind to the political persuasions of the recipients, but is committed to the proposition that information must be freely shared on all sides.
• A compassion as to the sources of the information that seeks to protect from harm those who provided it, assembled it, and analyzed it.

Easy to accomplish? Hardly. So we need to cut ourselves some slack. The industrial revolution created seismic changes in social, economic, and ethical conditions that took more than a century to sort through. The Information Age is creating similar shifts. No wonder we need a new ethic — and no wonder we’re only just getting there.

(c)2004 Institute for Global Ethics

“They generate revenue through the advertising that could help offset operating costs and fund educational programs. We’re not talking about a little money, we’re talking about a lot of money, actually.”

– Brian Ungar, head of Pennsylvania-based InSight Media, talking about his plans to paste advertisements inside school buses. While critics say the buses should be left clean of the now-ubiquitous produce placements, Ungar — and school districts across the country — say the revenues from such ads would help plug holes in badly underfunded school budgets. Ungar’s ideal: 15 ads — promoting colleges and toothpaste, stumping against drugs and tobacco, for example — per bus, costing about $30 each per month. (“Pa. Co. Seeks to Put Ads on School Buses,” AP, Mar. 7)

WASHINGTON
Four of the nation’s biggest Internet service providers (ISPs) last week ganged up to take down a handful of the most persistent spammers, warning they mean business when it comes to cleaning up the nation’s email.

The four firms — America Online, Earthlink, Microsoft, and Yahoo! — filed suits individually and collectively, targeting hundreds of individuals who have failed to obey anti-spam legislation passed last year.

That law — known as the Can-Spam Act — was intended to reduce the number of unsolicited emails deluging users with offers of prescription drugs, sexual aids, free porn, and get-rich-quick schemes.

So far, the law has failed to turn the tide: Last month, spam accounted for 62 percent of all email — 4 percent more than the figure from last December, email filtering firm Brightmail told the New York Times.

“We have been operating under a regime where ISPs can sue spammers for eight years,” anti-spam law expert David Kramer lamented to the Times. “When you cut off one head of the hydra, two more heads pop up.”

While the ISPs already have filed more than a hundred anti-spam lawsuits individually, they said that last week marked a new collective effort to take the fight to those who fail to respect the public’s right to be shut of junk mail.

“We are trying to find the biggest, the baddest, and the most notorious,” America Online lawyer Randall Boe told the Times. “When we work together it helps us find the most high-impact defendants.”

Microsoft deputy general counsel Nancy Anderson agreed, promising that her firm “will follow the money, and the money will show us where these people are and what they have done.”

TOKYO
The United Nations last week urged member nations, companies, and consumers to think twice before buying a new computer, warning that the quick turnover of machines is likely to cause severe environmental damage.

The warning comes from a UN research group based in Tokyo, which noted that the manufacture of the average PC and monitor requires 10 times the products’ weight in chemicals and fossil fuels.

For the average 50-pound personal computer and monitor combo, that’s nearly 530 pounds of mostly toxic chemicals — arsenic, chromium, lead, and mercury, among them — and fossil fuels that contribute to global warming, according to a report from the BBC.

The UN report asks consumers and companies to question their impulse to abandon slightly old computers for new ones and to upgrade machines instead of simply disposing of them.

“Every computer user has a role to play,” report co-editor Eric Williams told the BBC.

UN member countries are asked to offer incentives for upgrading and to better control disposal and recycling of discarded machines.

While the European Union had adopted a law designed to address such end-of-life issues, the United States, which is the biggest producer and consumer of PCs, so far has failed to take similar steps, noted a report from the Agence France-Presse.

LONDON
Despite repeated internal warnings about overstated oil reserves, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group waited two years to disclose the problems to investors, precipitating a turnover in the company’s leadership, the New York Times reported last week.

Shell’s decision to stall on disclosing overblown figures was revealed in corporate memoranda and notes, according to the Times, which examined the documents.

Faced with dwindling reserves and tough competition in the 1990s, Shell reportedly tweaked accounting rules to enable it to inflate the volume of expected oil extractions, making the company look more stable.

Most of these misstatements were made between 1997 and 2002, when Sir Philip Watts was in charge of exploration and production, according to the Times. Watts later was promoted to chairman.

Shell’s misstatements added about four billion barrels of oil to the company’s reported reserves, bolstering its image and improving its reported assets by tens of billions of dollars, according to the Times.

The problem, according to the report: After U.S. authorities tightened accounting rules in the wake of the Enron collapse, Shell executives began realizing they would have to drastically lower their overstated oil-reserve estimates.

Instead of making that news public, the company decided to stick to an “external storyline” and “investor relations script” designed to minimize the importance of reserves as a yardstick for the company’s health, according to a July 2002 memo the Times said it had examined.

Two months ago, the company ended the wait, stunning investors by cutting its proven reserves by 20 percent — the equivalent of 3.9 billion barrels, roughly the same amount inflated by the 1990s overstatements.

Watts and Walter van de Vijver, who succeeded him as head of exploration and production, were both privy to the 2002 decision to stall the bad news. Both men were ousted earlier this month without explanation.

As recently as last month, Watts insisted that he had done no wrong. As soon as he learned of the overstatements, he said “it was a matter of all hands on deck,” according to the Times.

“I remember writing down the words ‘get the facts and do the right thing,’ because we had a duty to disclose as soon as it was possible,” Watts said in February.

Saying only that Shell had “lost confidence” in Watts, the company appointed Jeroen van der Veer as its new chairman. Van der Veer and chief financial officer Judy Boynton also were copied on the July 2002 memo, according to the Times.

LONDON
Following the suicide of a deeply indebted father, British finance firms were called to account last week for reportedly offering credit too easily and with too few screening measures.

Questions about the industry’s practices were leveled by MP John Mann, who called on banks and lenders to be more responsible when deciding to whom and how much to lend.

Mann took the lead last week after one of his constituents, Stephen Lewis, a married father of two, hung himself after amassing more than $117,000 in debt on 19 different credit cards, reported the BBC.

At the time of his suicide last July, Lewis, whose debt was more than three times his annual salary of $37,000, was still within his credit limit, reported the Guardian.

Lewis’s widow, Susan, urged Mann to take up the fight against lax lending policies. Last week, they proposed reforms to 10 Downing Street, Treasury officials, and several of the nation’s leading banks.

Among those measures: improving credit checks before offering loans and cards, putting ceilings on the number of allowed cards and total debt, and providing annual consolidated reports of all owed debt.

“One of the questions we have asked,” Mann told the Guardian, “is how can an individual earning $37,000 a year get 19 credit cards? Why was nothing done six months to a year before?”

“Although 19 may be extreme, it is by no means exceptional,” Malcolm Hurlston, chairman of the Consumer Credit Counselling Service, added in the Guardian report, contending that rather than focusing on the number of cards, creditors should pay more attention to how debt is handled.

“Any customer paying no more than the minimum amount each month on a number of cards is already over-indebted, with debts about to spiral out of control. Minimum payment information needs to be shared among creditors so they can make better decisions,” Hurlston said.

The industry’s Association of Payment Clearing Services last week said it would look into Lewis’s situation, telling people who feel overwhelmed by debt to contact their credit card companies.

“Our industry has clear rules on treating borrowers sympathetically and fairly if they experience debt problems,” the association said in a statement.

LOS ANGELES
The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) last week shut down its donated cadaver program following allegations that the program’s director was selling body parts to outside firms for medical research.

Willed Body Program administrator Henry Reid was arrested after being accused of selling bodies and body parts through middlemen from 1998 through 2003, reported the Los Angeles Times.

Reid allegedly sold at least 496 cadavers donated to the UCLA School of Medicine for more than $700,000, according to invoices obtained in the ongoing investigation, according to the Times.

Ernest Nelson, an accused middleman arrested and charged with receiving stolen property, said he purchased parts from more than 800 cadavers over the past six years, reported the Reuters news agency.

Nelson, who has denied wrongdoing, said he obtained the body parts and transferred them to medical research facilities at firms, including Johnson & Johnson, with the knowledge of UCLA.

“Mr. Nelson had every reason to believe what he was doing was on the up and up,” his lawyer, Greg Hafif, told the New York Times. “He would come in, cut the parts up in front of everyone, help medical students as they did autopsies, teach them how to cut, then pack the parts up and take them out the front door.”

Dr. Gerald Levey, vice chancellor of UCLA Medical Sciences and dean of the medical school, apologized last week to donors and their families.

“These alleged crimes violate the trust of the donors, their families, and UCLA,” Levey said at a news conference, according to the Los Angeles Times. “We are deeply sorry.”

“We truly thought that we had adequate policies and procedures,” Levey added. “We are investigating how our policies failed to detect these employees’ illegal activities.”

UCLA’s Willed Body Program, which receives about 175 cadavers every year, was suspended indefinitely pending court hearings and talks with families, reported Reuters.

COLUMBUS, Ohio
The state education board of Ohio last week authorized the teaching of so-called intelligent design in science classes, saying the theory — a variation on religious creationism — was a valid alternative to evolution.

Following six hours of testimony, the board voted 13-to-5 to supplement its science materials with 22 pages of optional lessons advocating the belief that a higher power was involved in creating modern life forms.

The new material, titled “Critical Analysis of Evolution,” is optional for teachers and will not be covered by tests, noted the Associated Press.

Critics, including board member Sam Schloemer, accused the education board of sacrificing scientific facts to popular pressure, saying the new lessons “further erode the status and the value of Ohio’s public education system.”

Similar proposals to teach the intelligent-design theory also are under way in Alabama, Montana, Minnesota, Missouri, and Montana, reported the Agence France-Presse.

In an editorial last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lawrence Krauss, chairman of the physics department at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University, condemned such efforts as “bad science.”

“It is the business of science-standards committees and state boards of education to help promote scientific literacy, based on sound scientific scholarship, and not to cave in to political, religious, or other popular pressures,” he wrote, according to the AFP.

In 1999, Kansas made a comparable move to teach evolution as merely one theory among many. A year later, that change was reversed following a wave of criticism

AUGUSTA, Maine
The Christian Civic League of Maine was roundly criticized last week by lawmakers of all stripes after asking people to supply “tips, rumors, speculation, and facts” about state officials’ sexual orientations.

Saying he wanted to expose lawmakers and state officials who may be opposed to the religious group’s efforts to ban gay marriage, League executive director Michael Heath asked people to “out” officials in a posting on the group’s Web site.

While the league has had support in the past, lawmakers at the state capital in Augusta last week unanimously denounced the league for going too far this time, reported the Portland Press Herald.

Lawmakers from all parties and political persuasions reacted to Heath’s efforts by sporting solidarity pins, signing statements criticizing the league, and “outing” themselves as gay, regardless of their orientation.

“How many representatives came out of the closet today?” Rep. Sean Faircloth (D-Bangor) asked a reporter. “You can add me to the list,” he added. Faircloth is not gay, noted the Press Herald.

Because Maine has no civil rights law specifically protecting the rights of gays, gay people can be fired, evicted, and denied credit solely because of their sexual orientation. Compiling a list of gay officials, some critics noted, might put their welfare at risk.

Maine Governor John Baldacci, normally mild mannered, last week issued a blistering condemnation of the league’s efforts, saying they “cannot be taken sitting down.”

“Whether lists are based on rumors or facts is irrelevant — the Christian Civic League’s effort to invade the privacy and destroy the careers of Maine’s gay and lesbian citizens is an offense of the highest order deserving all of the condemnation I can muster,” Baldacci said in a statement.

Shortly before the Maine Senate signed a unanimous letter of outrage, Heath apologized on the Christian Civic League’s Web site, saying he should not have published his request.

The group’s board chairman last week said it “will stand solidly behind [Heath] because we know he’s a man of integrity,” reported the Press Herald.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

VANCOUVER
The front page of newspapers and the lead stories on national television news in Canada have changed from primary coverage of the ongoing corruption scandals in Ottawa to pictures of Vancouver Canucks player Todd Bertuzzi, a leading National Hockey League (NHL) player, landing a blow from behind on Colorado Avalanche rookie player, Steve Moore, and then falling on top of him as the Avalanche player’s face hit the ice.

Bertuzzi reportedly was avenging a questionable hit delivered in a February game by Moore to Canucks captain Markus Naslund, who missed three games with a concussion, reported the New York Times.

Following Bertuzzi’s attack, Moore was hospitalized and treated for a fractured neck, concussion, and deep facial lacerations, which are expected to prevent him from playing for the rest of the season.

Canadians who have argued over the level of violence in their national sport are unified and unforgiving in their condemnation of the Canucks player for his premeditated attack on Moore, who was unable to defend himself.

Some Canadian spectators immediately went to local police to ask for an investigation into whether Bertuzzi committed a criminal assault. The police last week said they have started an investigation.

The NHL last week suspended Bertuzzi for the rest of the season and may extend the suspension for the next season. The Canucks have been hit with a monetary penalty of $250,000 for not doing enough to prevent such acts of violence.

The cost to Bertuzzi of sitting out the rest of the season is reported to be over $500,000.

Bertuzzi’s attack on Moore is the second time in two years that the NHL has been pushed to investigate on-ice violence. In 2000, the NHL suspended Boston Bruins player Marty McSorley for one year after he struck Vancouver’s Donald Brashear in the head with his stick.

From the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

“The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) today released enforcement and litigation statistics for Fiscal Year 2003, covering October 2002 through September 2003….

“The data show that 81,293 private sector employment discrimination charges were filed with agency field offices nationwide last fiscal year and 87,755 were resolved for $236 million in monetary benefits and other relief. EEOC filed 361 new lawsuits and resolved 378 suits resulting in $149 million in monetary benefits as well as significant injunctive and remedial relief.

“‘Discrimination continues to be a problem in too many of today’s workplaces,’ said EEOC Chair Cari M. Dominguez, reflecting on the FY 2003 data. ‘As we approach the 40th anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 this July, it is evident that much progress has been made over the past four decades. Nevertheless, there is still much to do before we fulfill the EEOC’s mission and mandate to eradicate unlawful discrimination from our nation’s workplaces and ensure the freedom to compete for all individuals.’

“Race-based charges were the most frequently alleged type of discrimination, followed by sex/gender, retaliation, age, disability, national origin, religion, and equal pay. Approximately 20 percent of charges filed with EEOC offices resulted in a ‘merit resolution’ with a favorable outcome for the charging party; 63 percent were deemed to have ‘no reasonable cause’ (no merit); and 17 percent of charges resulted in ‘administrative closures’ (such as failure to locate the charging party, no statutory jurisdiction, and other administrative reasons).

“The 81,293 total private sector charge filings in FY 2003 break down as follows:

“NOTE: Individuals may allege multiple types of discrimination in one charge filing, thus the percentage of total charges will add up to more than 100 percent.

“Additionally, there were 13,566 sexual harassment charge filings and 4,649 pregnancy discrimination charge filings with EEOC offices as well as state and local Fair Employment Practices Agencies in FY 2003….”

“Our aspirations are our possibilities.”

– Robert Browning (English poet, 1812-1889)