E-democracy, rights and privacy in the age of information

摘要

The information age is here. The first technologically enabled global society is only just on its knees. Imagine when in ten years time, when the information age begins to actually take off. For many the sheer speed and power of the early ICT rush is already causing fear. To those in power, this fear has reached a stage where the acquisition of electronic rights appears to offer a means of controlling the behemoth that has now been unleashed. In reality however, the power of the turbo-charged information society is only at its first stage of development and should be recognised as something that should be constructed on universal principles of democratic good, decided by informed citizens in open forum and not by corporate and bureaucratic interests behind closed doors. What is frightening is that many initiatives presented in this brief overview and beyond are of the statused model, tending to privilege existing public and private elites. Human rights are not protected by systematic process against much of this abuse despite new human rights legislation in some places. Quite the opposite, people are often dispossessed of potential and actual rights and soon marginalised.