Late Saturday, as news trickled in about street protests in Myanmar, we were picking blueberries on a Maine mountainside when the phone rang.

That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. When I was growing up, berry picking meant scrambling to the tops of rocky cuts where they’d blasted the highway through the forest. It meant following no particular path, but going where the intuition took you, always searching the ankle-high bushes for the brightest and largest clusters. It meant a commitment — usually several hours — ending only when the empty Jack and Jill Peanut Butter pails were brim-full.

But mostly, it meant setting other things aside, including the rest of the world. While the word multitasking hadn’t yet been coined, it was clear already that if you thought success meant doing several things at once, blueberrying wasn’t your thing.

As the late afternoon sun raked the distant hills on Saturday, it highlighted a cell-phone tower that may have been enabling the ringing. The member of our group who answered was planning a fundraising event several thousand miles away in the Caribbean. Wandering a few feet off, she talked for five minutes with the artist designing her invitation on deadline. Then she came back to berry picking.

The nice thing about blueberrying is that it takes some concentration, but not much. It sets you loose to intersect with others and then drift apart, without need of repeated hellos or goodbyes. You talk easily when you’re close by and unapologetically fall silent when you’re not.

In one of those silent periods, I found myself thinking about that ringing phone. There were phones ringing in Myanmar, too, where a ghastly and tyrannical government once again had cracked down intensely on its opponents. This time, soldiers had fired into a parade of monks and their supporters. Several were dead, and many more had been wounded.

But this week something was different. Foreign journalists had largely been purged from the country, yet the news was still getting out. Armed with cell phones, video cameras, Internet blogs, and a passion for truth-telling, the public had transformed itself into a pack of amateur journalists. Never mind that the world’s major news outlets couldn’t get in. Never mind that the government imposed draconian censorship on local reporting. News was flowing like water down a mountainside.

And it wasn’t just washing away. As the country’s clique of aging despots has folded in more tightly upon itself in recent years, exiles have built news networks outside the country. Working daily with news from sources operating within Myanmar (formerly Burma), they’ve learned to sift fact from rumor, weigh the essential against the merely interesting, and keep their supporters informed. So when the protests broke open this past week, there were well-practiced traditions of editorial judgment. There were audiences around the world eager for the news. And there were obvious destinations for dispatches from citizen journalists.

One such destination, the Democratic Voice of Burma, operates radio and TV stations from its base in Norway. “Our station is a key factor in making a change,” Khin Maung Win told Reuters last week. In 1988, a military crackdown against a massive protest killed some 3,000 people. At the time, “Burma was a completely closed country,” he said, and “there was no media coverage.” Now, he said, “everyone is watching.”

From the perspective of a pristine Maine mountainside, it’s easy to criticize cell-phone towers for spoiling the view. There’s a good deal of local protest about plans to build another nearby. But those protests, however they end, won’t descend into bloodshed. That’s how freedom works. Not only does it let technology change the way you do business, making possible new interminglings of work and leisure that were impossible when I first went blueberrying, it also lets you preserve the kind of liberties Maine has and Myanmar wants.

And that’s the point. What tyrants for centuries have accomplished by brute force — walling off their enemies behind barriers of invisibility, killing and maiming without publicity, viciously eliminating all reporting except what they sanction, luxuriating in a secrecy that lets them merge the grim work of oppression with their leisurely appropriation of power — is suddenly being upended. The agent of change is not tanks and troops. It’s the flitting of tiny electronic impulses around the world.

Yes, there’s a moral downside to the advance of cell phones. Towers litter the landscape. Kids forget how to be solitary. Students message their friends during exams to get the answers. Drivers making calls swerve off the highway. Terrorists wire phones to bombs. But there’s a moral upside as well. Transparency overcomes obfuscation. Truth-telling slices through censorship. People do more in less time, with greater teamwork and less wasted effort. And from Maine and Myanmar, in ways no dictatorship can squelch, freedom literally rings.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“For over 200 years, this nation has adhered to the rule of law — with unparalleled success. A shift to a nation based on extraconstitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill advised.”

– U.S. judge Anne Aiken of Federal District Court in Portland, Oregon, ruling last week that “crucial parts of the USA Patriot Act were not constitutional because they allowed federal surveillance and searches of Americans without demonstrating probable cause,” reports the New York Times. Leaving in place the Patriot Act’s allowances for government surveillance would usurp the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, Aiken ruled. The government is “asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning.”

BERLIN
The global anticorruption group Transparency International (TI) last week urged multinational companies and financial institutions to actively combat bribery and attempt to stanch the flow of illicit money.

In its annual report on perceptions of corruption worldwide, TI argued that “bribe money often stems from multinationals based in the world’s richest countries,” according to a summary of the report from the International Herald Tribune. “It can no longer be acceptable for these companies to regard bribery in export markets as a legitimate business strategy.”

The group’s annual survey, which measures the perceived level of corruption in 180 nations, did note that some African countries, such as Namibia and Swaziland, have improved their reputations, as did some Eastern European nations that cleaned up their financial affairs in order to gain admittance to the European Union, according to a report from Radio Netherlands.

But many of the world’s poorest nations, including several in Africa, languished near the bottom of the list, reports the Nairobi Business Daily. Kenya was ranked in the bottom 10, along with Zimbabwe, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

Wealthier countries generally rose high on the list, which was topped by Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Iceland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, and Norway, in that order. The United States placed 20th on the list.

But TI chair Huguette Labelle did not let high-ranking countries off the hook entirely, contending that they often serve as enablers of graft. In an opinion piece published by the Toronto Globe & Mail, Labelle wrote, “Wealthy countries must also acknowledge their role and regulate their financial center more strictly. Focusing on the roles of trusts, demanding knowledge of beneficial ownership and strengthening anti-money-laundering provisions are just a few of the ways that rich governments can tackle the facilitators of corruption.”

“Multinational companies have to do more to clean up international business. They must not only introduce but implement effective anti-bribery codes, and ensure that they are adhered to by subsidiaries and foreign offices,” Labelle added.

The most striking finding was the strong correlation between poverty and perceived corruption, according to an analysis from the Agence France-Presse. About four in ten countries perceived to have rampant corruption are classified by the World Bank as low-income nations.

Many of the most corrupt countries also are torn by strife. At the bottom of the list is Somalia, with Myanmar at number 179, Iraq at 178, and Haiti at 177.

The data are culled from surveys of experts on corruption, and measure only the perception of corruption, leading some of the nations low on the list to complain that the study is based on rumor, not fact.

Government and business spokespersons in the Philippines, for example, were quick to criticize the methodology and point to what they said were significant success stories in the fight against graft, reports the Manila Standard.

The Philippines fell to 131st on this year’s list, down 10 spots from 2006.

WASHINGTON
One of the more ethically controversial research practices in science — clinical trials in which millions of human are given experimental drugs or newly developed medical devices — receives little oversight, according to a new watchdog report.

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general says that over a six-year period the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency in charge of supervising clinical trials, inspected just one out of every 100 trial sites, according to a report from USA Today.

The problem, according to the report, is that the FDA does not even have a comprehensive list of clinical trials taking place, meaning that the government is unable to identify all of the sites or institutional review boards that oversee the ethical, legal, and scientific requirements for the studies, reports the Associated Press.

Also, the report claims that the FDA has only 200 inspectors responsible for more than 350,000 test sites, according to Reuters. When negative findings were reported by inspectors, the report maintains, they were downgraded more than half of the time after being reviewed by top officials in Washington.

FDA officials say that Congress has failed to provide adequate funding for the agency to do its job.

In an MSNBC commentary, Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that the lack of hard data on human experimentation is “beyond belief,” considering that “the government agencies responsible for monitoring research with animals collect exactly that data every year. How can it be that we know how many pigs, frogs, rats, and monkeys are used in research and who uses them without knowing what is going on with respect to human beings?”

Caplan maintains that some fundamental ethical issues go unexamined because of the agency’s troubles: “Are too many poor people disproportionately recruited for research? Who knows? Are the elderly in nursing homes underrepresented in clinical trials? Who can tell? Should more children be involved in studies of new drugs? Cannot say. Is it more likely that people get injured in for-profit test centers than in academic research settings? No data is available to answer that question.”

VARIOUS DATELINES
A variety of issues related to media ethics dominated the headlines last week. Among them:

• A full-page ad in the Sep. 10 edition of the New York Times created an ethics controversy that worked its way up to the halls of Congress. MoveOn.org, an organization opposed to the war in Iraq, took out the ad on the day that the U.S. commander in Iraq was to testify before congress. A banner headline asked, “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” A subtitled headline read, “Cooking the Books for the White House.” The tone and tenor of the ad was immediately attacked by conservative pundits, who were later joined by Republican presidential candidates and some Democrats as well when, on Sep. 26, the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the ad, according to reports from the Hill, a publication covering Congress, and the London-based Economist. The Times was criticized not only for carrying the ad but also for providing a discount rate for the space, an action the Times’s ombudsman admitted was in violation of standard contract terms.
• The corporate rivalry between high-tech powerhouses Google and Microsoft moved into ethics territory last week as a Senate panel heard arguments that a proposed business acquisition by Google would threaten consumer privacy and stifle competition, the Washington Post reports. Microsoft objected to Google’s plan to merge with online advertising firm DoubleClick, claiming that mating the top two search and advertising firms would do more than provide an efficient way to display ads based on surfers’ interests — it would put privacy at risk by consolidating information about viewing habits in the hands of one monolith.
• Facebook, the second-largest social networking website in the world, was hit with a subpoena last week from New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo, who charged that the company fails to protect young users from online predators, reports CBS News. Cuomo said undercover investigators, posing as young teens, were solicited and had access to online pornography. Facebook did not immediately respond to the allegations.
• The U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons last week reversed its earlier actions and put back on the shelves of prison libraries various religious books that were deemed to promote extremism. The purge of books under the “Standardized Chapel Library Project” was blasted by a wide spectrum of religious and secular leaders, who charged that it put the government in the position of dictating acceptable religious content, violating the separation of church and state, reports the Jurist, a law-school publication from the University of Pittsburgh. The Bureau says it will return everything except material directly advocating violence.
• Verizon Wireless last week reversed its decision to block text messages on its network from an abortion-rights group. PC World reports that several other political groups, including the Republican National Committee and Amnesty International, have used text-messaging campaigns via Verizon. Verizon first claimed it was exercising its legal right to block incendiary messages, but later said in a statement that its “dusty” policy was written before text messaging protections were developed to isolate customers from spam. Critics argued that the controversy shows the need for Congress to pass a “Net neutrality” law that will prevent carriers from blocking or slowing content, according to the PC World story.

WASHINGTON
New research suggests that legalized physician-assisted suicide has not been used as a method to eradicate people who could be a burden to society.

The BBC reports the study was designed to test claims that in places were doctors are legally allowed to help people die, the practice would be used to coerce the most vulnerable members of society to end their lives.

The study appears to contradict worries that the legalized practice would lead to disproportionate deaths of the elderly, women, minorities, the mentally ill, the poor, or the less-educated, according to a report from UPI.

“We found that there is no evidence of disproportionate impact of these practices, when legal, on any of those groups, with the exception of people with AIDS,” University of Utah bioethicist Margaret Battin, who led the study appearing in the Journal of Medical Ethics, told the Reuters news agency.

But Reuters notes that the incidence of higher suicide rates among AIDS patients represents a very small number of cases.

Britain’s Channel 4 News reports that the study focused on Oregon and the Netherlands, where law permits doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to patients documented as being terminally ill. In Oregon, patients must take the drugs themselves, while in the Netherlands physicians can actually administer the lethal dose.

The study will be published in an upcoming edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics.

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.
The ball that Barry Bonds slammed out of the park and into the record books is headed for the Baseball Hall of Fame — but not before being branded with an asterisk.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that the ball, a symbol of controversy because Bonds has been plagued by accusations that he used performance-enhancing drugs to propel himself to the position of home-run king, will be a visual reference to many fans’ assertion that the record books should contain a footnote explaining the extenuating circumstances.

New York fashion designer Marc Ecko purchased the ball for $750,000 from the fan who caught it, then set up a website for fans to vote on its fate. The choices were to send it to the Hall of Fame as is, send it to the Hall of Fame with an asterisk, or blast it into space.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig declined to comment on the ultimate decision to brand the ball, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Officials at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, told the Daily Star newspaper in nearby Oneonta that the museum was ambivalent about the asterisk.

“As an American history museum, this is an integral part of baseball history,” Hall of Fame vice president for communications and education Jeff Idelson told the Star. “It’s equivalent to landing a one-of-a-kind painting. It’s unfortunate it’s marked, but on the same token, we understand why it is and we’ll have to explain the reason to every visitor that comes through…. We were hopeful the ball would come in unmarked. We don’t believe in the decimation of artifacts. In this case we had to look beyond that a little bit because of the historical perspective.”

LONDON
With the holiday gift-giving season looming, talk in ethics circles is once again centering on the proper gift to convey a sense of social responsibility.

As has been reported in previous years’ editions of Ethics Newsline®, popular choices have included Fairtrade foods, ethically sourced clothing, charity donations, adoption of endangered species, and purchasing livestock for families in the developing world.

This season, though, the trend seems to be leaning toward the high-tech: Times of London reporter Jonathan Richards writes that “this year’s ethical Christmas present has a more 21st century feel — a laptop equipped with wi-fi.”

“The project that aims to bring $100 computers to the developing world, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), has said it will enable Western customers to donate machines as Christmas gifts.

“For $399,” Richards notes, “customers in the U.S. and Canada will be able to purchase two laptops — one for themselves, the other for a child in a poor country — as part of an initiative called ‘Give One, Get One.’ ”

The OLPC laptop, which developers say may in a few years live up to its original promise of being available for only $100, is specially engineered to withstand the strain of being used in rural villages. It features an extra-bright screen that can be read outside and a wind-up crank to power it.

According to the Times, orders for the laptops will be taken in a two-week period beginning November 12.

From the Wall Street Journal and Harris Interactive®:

“President George W. Bush is taking steps to curb the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which provides health insurance coverage to children in lower income households. These new restrictions heighten the ongoing battle between Congress and the Bush Administration as to the future of SCHIP, with Congressional Democrats seeking to expand rather than contract the program.

“While some U.S. adults are unsure about whether or not they would support the proposal to expand the program (34%), those who favor expansion outnumber those in opposition by four to one (53% support vs. 13% oppose). Although Republicans (42%) are less likely than Democrats (66%) or Independents (60%) to be in favor of the program’s proposal expansion, supporters still outnumber opponents by two to one….

“Congress has proposed funding the expansion of SCHIP by either increasing the federal tax on cigarettes or reducing the subsidies provided to commercial insurers that offer insurance coverage to seniors. Sixty-two percent of all adults say they strongly favor funding the expansion of SCHIP via increased tobacco taxes…. Only a minority — again across party lines — favor reducing the subsidies that are provided to insurers who cover seniors in order to expand coverage for children.

“Congressional Republicans and the Bush Administration have stated that expanding SCHIP is a bad idea because it is a form of socialized medicine that is run by big government. Regardless of party affiliation, only a minority of adults (22%) agrees with this statement. On the other side of the argument, Democrats contend that expanding the program is a good idea because it is highly successful in reducing the number of uninsured children in this country. Most adults (58%), including half of all Republicans (51%), side with the Democrats in this argument.

“Katherine Binns, Division President for Healthcare Research at Harris Interactive, comments, ‘These findings suggest that as the debate continues, public opinion will remain in favor of the Democrats’ position. With broad support for SCHIP spanning both sides of the political aisle among U.S. adults, it will be interesting to see if the Congress and Bush Administration can come to a consensus on this issue that Americans will view as acceptable.’…”

“The most complete revenge is not to imitate the aggressor.”

– Marcus Aurelius (Roman emperor and stoic philosopher, 121-180)