Information is power. Information about you, your family, your company, your country, and so on can be used to affect your social standing, your professional reputation, even your personal role in your community. Information can make the difference between victory and defeat in military conflict, between success and failure in a capital venture, between life and death in criminal suit. Every type of information can be used to exert power over an individual life – and the ethical use of this information must be determined for society to function smoothly.

Ethics may be considered a personal standard of right and wrong, good and evil, moral and immoral. Ethics can be limited to individual interpretation or applied to the society at large. But ethics are, uniquely, a matter of personal beliefs. As a philosophical entity, ethics cannot be validated or proved. Ethics cannot be the same for different individuals. Your ethics reflect your interpretation of information received during personal experiences.

Laws embody the definition of a society’s ethics. The laws of a society represent the ethics of a community – the shared ethics of a given group of individuals. Countries, states, counties, and towns all have laws that reflect the morality of a majority of the constituents. These laws are changed as the ethics of the majority changes with shared experiences and information.

Two of the major ethical frameworks include Kantianism and utilitarianism (Froehlich, 1991, Woodward, 1989). Kantianism suggests that our sense of right and wrong should be based on rights, duties, and obligations. This philosophy holds forth that the only good is good will.

Kantianism leads us to the conclusion that one cannot do wrong if the intent is good.

Utilitarianism suggests that our sense of right and wrong should be based on achieving the optimum happiness for the largest possible number of people. This philosophy holds forth that the greatest good is that which creates the greatest pleasure. Utilitarianism leads us to a more hedonistic approach to ethics.

By using a framework, we can define a context in which to discuss ethical decisions - a common ground from which we can build. Both frameworks can be applied to the issues of information use and control - providing good models for the eventual conceptualization of laws governing information.

The affects of information control have been felt throughout the ages. Information control takes many forms: censorship, propaganda, slander. This control has been used to control populations under the auspices of protecting the uneducated from themselves, such as when the Alexandria library was burned. Information control has promoted political and religious ideals, unseated political powers, and destroyed innocent and guilty men alike. Military might cannot be effective unless buttressed by the knowledge – the information – of enemy position and intent. Governments cannot provide full information on all activities for fear of the power that the information will give competing countries the advantage.

Floridi (1998) describes informational privacy as "S’ freedom from epistemic interference or intrusion, achieved thanks to a restriction on facts about S that are unknown or unknowable." That is, informational privacy is the assurance that you can withhold certain information about yourself in order that others may not interfere with you. For example, medical records represent information about an individual that is closely guarded by medical professionals. Elaborate procedures are in place to ensure that your medical records cannot be accessed unlawfully.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) represents one of the most important pieces of legislation in the United States for information privacy and access. The government is, by this act, required to provide information about its activities in a timely and reasonable fashion, unless that information interferes with government safety or personal privacy. Personal privacy, in this sense, extends to both medical and criminal records (Freedom of Information Act, 1996). The debate about whether this information should be privileged or subject to investigation is ongoing (Campbell, 1999, Cox, 1997) Is it right to report patient names in newspaper articles?

Intellectual property has the slippery problem of being intangible. If you own a car, you may point to and touch the car. You may have witnesses who saw you buy the car. Ideas, however, have no witnesses to inception, no tangible physical presence in our world. Does creation of information constitute ownership? Some debates have even been raised as to the right to own such intangible property (Childe, 1990). Within our own laws, we certainly have the right to our own ideas. Copyright laws, licensing agreements, and contracts provide protections for intellectual developments and the dissemination of information. Recent developments in the Internet have challenged lawyers and ethicists alike to adjust our rules to this a new environment (Kaye, 1999). At what point does information cease to be a right and become a privilege?

Since each country has a different law regarding intellectual property, problems arise when deciding ownership and appropriate recompense for ideas. Software piracy, rampant in Asia, is one symptom of this larger concern.

Access is another aspect of information that can be controlled. Librarians must deal with information access decisions daily, determining what information will be made accessible to the public and what information will not. Cornog and Perper (1997) discuss the somewhat uneven handling of sex manuals in libraries. Currently, access to information is often considered a privilege, not a right (Piccininni, 1997). That privilege may be afforded by wealth (allowing you to travel to the information or buy a computer with which to access the information), age (allowing you to enter a movie deemed inappropriate for younger audiences), political or government position (allowing you access to top secret information such as troop movements), language (allowing you to access information in a variety of languages) and so on. Is it right to restrict access to information based on these things?

Governments often control information access, not to protect themselves, but to protect their citizens. In 1989, Japan’s telephone company was contracted for pay-per-call information services. The services soon began to include sexual content. This development caused a public complaint against the company. The company stopped allowing services intending to supply sexual content. (Mashima & Hirose, 1996) The information was still available, but access to that information was controlled.

(Justice Potter Stewart, 1964 Jacobellis vs. Ohio )

Some information is considered harmful. Obscenity, anti-governmental rhetoric, religious fanaticism – these types of information may be thought of as potentially harmful. However, the definition of dangerous ideas must be carefully considered – even false or misleading information has value (Stauffer, 1997). Anti-government rhetoric brought about the Revolutionary War and the Third Reich. Religious fanaticism colonized America and created the dictatorship of Iraq. Censorship, the removal of information from an environment, prevents children in Kansas from learning about evolution and libraries from carrying Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Historically, censorship has been defended by citing the protection of the public from harmful ideas. This presupposes that the public is incapable or ill-prepared to deal with those ideas – unable to intelligently process the information and come to a correct conclusion. The ALA Code of Ethics defends the right of librarians, as information controllers, to resist attempts at censorship. However, the media and government can control the information we view every day. Ahmed (1998) looks at the stereotyping of women and women’s roles across cultural boundaries. Unsurprisingly, the research shows that the media propagates what is perceived as a societal norm. This type of information control - control over what the viewer watches - allows the media to influence the viewer. Media information control can promote or squelch access to ideas. Recently, the Internet has been used to promote human rights issues in countries that previously did not have access to media information control (Brophy & Haplin, 1999). This control allows groups to broadcast a message to other groups, increasing the awareness of their cause. Some people would consider this information as dangerous (Stauffer, 1997). Is it ethical for governments to control the media to prevent information that may be harmful to that government from being spread? What if the information is harmful to some citizens?

Academic research frequently touches the realm of ethics when the research is done about or with human subjects. Lengthy release forms have been crafted to ensure that the subjects are aware of their rights and the rights of the researcher. The Internet provides a new twist on this type of research. Numerous papers have been written on the ethical considerations of research done on cyberspace users (Childress & Asamen, 1998, Bier, Sherblom, & Gallo, 1996, Rosenoer, J., Isaacs, S., Macklin, R., & Silverman, S., 1995). Certainly, while the Internet opens exciting new ground for researchers, it also provides an increased number of ethical pitfalls. Researchers must consider international law, personal privacy issues, republishing of inflammatory speech, participant release permission, as well as the multitude of cultural issues created in the cyberspace community itself. For example, does recording the text in a public chat room for content analysis require participant release? The perceived anonymity and privacy of the Internet can be both a boon and a bane to the cyberspace researcher. A new paradigm of research must be developed to adequately address these unique ethical issues.

Historically, information control has been regulated within the geographical bounds of a country, a state, a county, or a town. With the advent of the Internet, laws developed for geographical locations no longer apply. A legal system for the Internet would need to encompass the entire virtual community and currently the disparity of personal experiences enforced by geographic and cultural differences makes this task difficult at best. Accountability is hindered by the anonymity of the electronic format (Froomkin, 1999).

The Internet has historically been regulated by its communities. Valauskas (1996) notes that legislation passed to regulate the Internet that does not take into account the nature of the Internet and its communities cannot be effective. In 1996, the United States passed the Communications Decency Act (CDA) to limit the transmission or display of "indecent" materials. The CDA was considered unconstitutional and was later dropped (Mashima & Hirose, 1996).

In specific online communities, rules are contracts between users and providers (Oberding & Norderhaug, 1996). If the users do not agree with online policies established by the providers - the rule setters - the simplest way to comply is to exit and join new communities where they agree with the new rule sets (Johnson and Post, 1998). For the Internet as a whole, Valauskas (1996) and Oberding and Norderhaug (1996) find a joint effort by technologists, lawyers, service providers, and business communities to develop official rules and norms to resolve conflicts arising from old law and new technology. Oberding and Norderhaug suggest that a group like the Internet Law Task Force - which became the Internet Law and Policy Forum (www.ilpf.org) - can serve to educate legislatures of legal issues arising from new technology and its activities. This group could help avoid potentially ineffective legislation.

The debate over what is ethical or lawful will continue as long as differences exist between human beings. But the struggle to come to a common ground is an important one. The increasing stress placed on ethical education as a part of technological education (Siponen & Kajava, 1997) increases the awareness of these issues. The development of new paradigms for consideration of ethics, such as the infosphere (Floridi, 1998), encourage us to consider the problem in new ways. Ethics is a constantly evolving and increasingly important aspect of information science (Zwass, 1996). As more information becomes available, the power of those who control the information increases. This control must be mediated by a concern to do what is best for mankind - to do right.

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