This project, which is funded by the Ethics and Values in Science, Engineering and Technology component of the Science and Society Program, is concerned with identity management technology in the context of law enforcement and homeland security. The term "identity management technology" is used to refer to all software and computer applications that support and facilitate: the identification of persons, and the authentication and verification of these identities; the authorization of persons to have informational or physical access to personal data; the tracing, surveillance and monitoring of identified persons; and the discovery of knowledge (e.g. through data mining) in databases on persons, using profiling, network analysis and statistical techniques. The research to be undertaken aims at establishing a balance between two central values in liberal democracies, namely security and privacy, in the deployment and design of identity management technology in the context of international crime and global terrorism. The project seeks to provide legally sustainable and technologically feasible global ethical standards for identity management technology and policies in the contemporary global security context. The standards in question are to be understood as global ethical standards potentially to be adopted not only by the US, but also by the European Union, Australasia, and all other relevant liberal democratic states, e.g. India and Japan. Although authoritarian states may not find such standards conducive, it is desirable that authoritarian states evolve into some form of liberal democracy, and to this extent the results of this project are relevant to authoritarian states. Moreover, the standards are to be sufficiently specific to determine, or at least substantially constrain, the requisite more detailed security and privacy policies and prescriptions in national as well as trans-national jurisdictions. The project distinguishes itself from other work in this field by integrating the expertise of ethicists, lawyers, law enforcement personnel and computer specialists in the development of the framework of global ethical standards. The work will be performed by a multidisciplinary, international team of academics and consultants, from the USA, Europe, India, Japan and Australasia. This project is principally concerned with the analysis of the ethical dimension of identity management technology, e.g., electronic surveillance, data-mining of personal data and profiling, in the context of international crime and global terrorism. Such ethical analysis is necessary to find feasible and ethically sustainable solutions to data protection and homeland security problems. The reconciliation of the basic values in conflict, namely security and privacy, in the form of a framework of global ethical standards, can be deployed in the design of specific institutional mechanisms and identity management tools. Well researched solutions will not only be disseminated in scholarly journals and texts, but will also be made available to policy makers, law enforcement personnel and the like, and thereby find their way into the actual practices of identity management and computer supported law enforcement. This is what the project aims to achieve.
