St. John the Evangelist - Ancient Faith, Modern Relevance

"Ethics In The Public Forum" is a rather broad concept. If you review what 'padoc' and I (the rector) have contributed to this forum, you'll quickly see that the entries are virtually all about domestic issues. The themes of health care and abortion are at the top of the list.

But this is the age of the internet, in which email, documents, sound, text, and video can be sent and received on everything from desktop computers to your cell phone or iPod. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, even such places as personal web sites all provide information and input from all over the world. Data flies back and forth around the globe in seconds. The clever can make money from this fact and the wicked can propagate their wickedness (online pornography was a $1 billion industry in 2002, with an estimated 10-fold increase within 10 years! See http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/12/10/porn.business/). The really clever know when to turn it all off!

Love letters, hate letters, gossip, business intelligence, contracts, raw scientific data, old books, the Dead Sea Scrolls, business transactions - well, you get it, the diversity approaches infinity. And the access to incredible amounts of input - some of questionable accuracy or value - vastly exceeds our ability to assimilate and integrate it into our thinking. Is there a point of diminishing returns for information (but that's another essay)?

In particular, this kind of data exchange supersedes barriers of culture, distance, and time. That can be great - and not so great. Some of the data that goes back and forth is actually meta-data, that is, it's data about the data. It includes information about the computer that sends the request and information about the computer that receives the request and returns a reply. From that information, one can extrapolate locations, times, dates, even names and addresses.

In China, that's not so cool! There, the right to critique the government, protest an action, or lay open the sins of a public figure are strictly curtailed. And - if one is caught on the wrong side of those activities - one's freedom or even one's life can be strictly curtailed! Google - the premier search engine of the internet - recently announced:

"In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident – albeit a significant one – was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists."

Google, as a corporate citizen, doesn't have a pristine record. Nevertheless, it's very interesting - and heartening - to see that Google is willing to "let its conscience be its guide" in this matter:

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China." (see http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html, http://volokh.com/)

To use a cliché, "what would Jesus do?" As I mentioned at the outset, Ethics In The Public Forum usually includes domestic matters, if not parochial matters. But that domestic and parochial mind set doesn't seem good enough any more.