The first Keynote directly after the Opening by Enno Rey was held by Ben Zevenbergen. At the beginning he pointed out that he is not a very technical guy rather he specialized in Information Law and a policy advisor to the European Parliament. Before he started to dive into his Keynote he talked about some rant story’s which happened to him while trying to make his point clear on previous conferences and that he came in peace to Troopers ;).
His overall theme was about the occurring Ethics gap and Ethics in the Networks research area. Thus he pointed out that engineers have no ethics and are basically consequentialists.
The Key point he was trying to make here was about whenever Engineers land in court, the judge won´t look at the final outcome of the Project and how it benefits mankind rather he will look into every single step in achieving this Project. If there is anything illegal within the responsible persons will be sued.
Another common mistake made is that people who are responsible for creating the Laws for the Internet Environment are experienced user but in reality most of them have no clue what they are regulating. Some of them just recently learned how to use E-Mail. This can catch Engineers off-guard because they think that their created tools are neutral but often they can be used for evil purposes and a Judge will focus rather on the Bad than the good things (e.g. Shodan accessing Baby cams).
Another Point he made was about the recent Data leaks (e.g. Ashley Madison) which was useful for several Data Miner/Researcher who crawl those leaks and publish their Results without taking in consideration that their Results could cause harm to someone else (e.g. Death Penalty for Homosexuality in Uganda).
This is basically what he called the Ethics Gap which resides between User-Privacy and useful Internet Research. With this in Mind he said that most Engineers don´t know about their Power and the ability to shift Power in the politics which is one reason why Politicians will try to enforce the Laws to prevent these Power shifts.
He wrapped it up with “who has access to what” which should be always a key consideration when creating such Data lakes and published his Guideline for Network Research:
Further Information can be found here:
His TR16 slides are available here:
Cheers,
Birk