Реферат: Конституция в киберпространстве: закон и свобода за электронной границей (english/russian)

Волгоградская академиягосударственной службы

Кафедра иностранных языков

Конституция в киберпространстве:

закон и свобода за
электронной границей

подготовила студенткагр.ЮВ-303

ПенкинаН.В.

руководитель ПершинЮ.Ю.

Волгоград

1998

The Constitution in Cyberspace:

Law and Liberty Beyond the Electronic Frontier

Introduction

My topic ishow to «map» the text and structure of our Constitution onto thetexture and topology of «cyberspace». That's the term coined bycyberpunk novelist William Gibson, which many now use to describe the«place» — a place without physical walls or even physical dimensions— where ordinary telephone conversations «happen,» where voice–mailand e-mail messages are stored and sent back and forth, and where computer-generatedgraphics are transmitted and transformed, all in the form of interactions, somereal-time and some delayed, among countless users, and between users and thecomputer itself.

Some use the«cyberspace» concept to designate fantasy worlds or «virtualrealities» of the sort Gibson described in his novel “Neuromancer”, inwhich people can essentially turn their minds into computer peripherals capableof perceiving and exploring the data matrix. The whole idea of «virtualreality,» of course, strikes a slightly odd note. As one of Lily Tomlin'smost memorable characters once asked, «What's reality, anyway, but acollective hunch?» Work in this field tends to be done largely by peoplewho share the famous observation that reality is overrated!

However thatmay be, «cyberspace» connotes to some users the sorts of technologiesthat people in Silicon Valley (like Jaron Lanier at VPL Research, for instance)work on when they try to develop «virtual racquetball» for thedisabled, computer-aided design systems that allow architects to walk through«virtual buildings» and remodel them before they are built, «virtual conferencing» forbusiness meetings, or maybe someday even «virtual day care centers»for latchkey children. The user snaps on a pair of goggles hooked up to ahigh-powered computer terminal, puts on a special set of gloves (and perhapsother gear) wired into the same computer system, and, looking a little bit likeDarth Vader, pretty much steps into a computer-driven, drug-free,3-dimensional, interactive, infinitely expandable hallucination complete withsight, sound and touch — allowing the user literally to move through, andexperience, information.

I'm using theterm «cyberspace» much more broadly, as many have lately. I'm usingit to encompass the full array of computer-mediated audio and/or videointeractions that are already widely dispersed in modern societies — fromthings as ubiquitous as the ordinary telephone, to things that are still comingon-line like computer bulletin boards and networks like Prodigy, or like theWELL («Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link»), based here in San Francisco. Mytopic, broadly put, is the implications of that rapidly expanding array for ourconstitutional order. It is a constitutional order that tends to carve up thesocial, legal, and political universe along lines of «physical place»or «temporal proximity.» The critical thing to note is that thesevery lines, in cyberspace, either get bent out of shape or fade out altogether.The question, then, becomes: when the lines along which our Constitution isdrawn warp or vanish, what happens to the Constitution itself?

Setting the Stage

To set thestage with a perhaps unfamiliar example, consider a decision handed down ninemonths ago, “Maryland v. Craig”, where the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the powerof a state to put an alleged child abuser on trial with the defendant's accusertestifying not in the defendant's presence but by one-way, closed-circuittelevision. The Sixth Amendment, which of course antedated television by a centuryand a half, says: «In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoythe right... to be confronted with the witnesses against him.» JusticeO'Connor wrote for a bare majority of five Justices that the state's proceduresnonetheless struck a fair balance between costs to the accused and benefits tothe victim and to society as a whole. Justice Scalia, joined by the three«liberals» then on the Court (Justices Brennan, Marshall andStevens), dissented from that cost-benefit approach to interpreting the SixthAmendment. He wrote:

The Court hasconvincingly proved that the Maryland procedure serves a valid interest, andgives the defendant virtually everything the Confrontation Clause guarantees(everything, that is, except confrontation). I am persuaded, therefore, thatthe Maryland procedure is virtually constitutional. Since it is not, however,actually constitutional I [dissent].

Could it bethat the high-tech, closed-circuit TV context, almost as familiar to theCourt's youngest Justice as to his even younger law clerks, might've had somebearing on Justice Scalia's sly invocation of «virtual»constitutional reality? Even if Justice Scalia wasn't making a pun on«virtual reality,» and I suspect he wasn't, his dissenting opinionabout the Confrontation Clause requires usto «confront» the recurring puzzle of how constitutional provisionswritten two centuries ago should be construed and applied in ever-changingcircumstances.

Shouldcontemporary society's technology-driven cost-benefit fixation be allowed towater down the old-fashioned value of direct confrontation that theConstitution seemingly enshrined as basic? I would hope not. In that respect, Ifind myself in complete agreement with Justice Scalia.

But newtechnological possibilities for seeing your accuser clearly without having youraccuser see you at all — possibilities for sparing the accuser any discomfortin ways that the accuser couldn't be spared before one-way mirrors orclosed-circuit Tvs were developed — shouldlead us at least to ask ourselves whether two-wayconfrontation, in which your accuser is supposed to be made uncomfortable, andthus less likely to lie, really isthe core value of the Confrontation Clause. If so, «virtual»confrontation should be held constitutionally insufficient. If not — if thecore value served by the Confrontation Clause is just the ability to watch your accuser say that you did it— then «virtual» confrontation should suffice. New technologiesshould lead us to look more closely at just what values the Constitution seeks to preserve. New technologiesshould not lead us to reactreflexively either way — either byassuming that technologies the Framers didn't know about make their concernsand values obsolete, or by assuming that those new technologies couldn'tpossibly provide new ways out of old dilemmas and therefore should be ignoredaltogether.

The one-waymirror yields a fitting metaphor for the task we confront. As the Supreme Courtsaid in a different context several years ago, «The mirror image presented[here] requires us to step through an analytical looking glass to resolveit.» (“NCAA v. Tarkanian”, 109 S. Ct. at 462.) The world in which theSixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause was written and ratified was a world inwhich «being confronted with» your accuser necessarily meant a simultaneous physical confrontation so thatyour accuser had to perceive youbeing accused by him. Closed-circuit television and one-way mirrors changed allthat by decoupling those twodimensions of confrontation, marking a shift in the conditions ofinformation-transfer that is in many ways typical of cyberspace.

What does thatsort of shift mean for constitutional analysis? A common way to react is totreat the pattern as it existed priorto the new technology (the pattern in which doing «A» necessarily included doing «B») asessentially arbitrary or accidental. Taking this approach, once thetechnological change makes it possible to do «A» without «B» — to see your accuser without having him orher see you, or to read someone's mail without her knowing it, to switchexamples — one concludes that the «old» Constitution's inclusion of«B» is irrelevant; one concludes that it is enough for the governmentto guarantee «A» alone. Sometimes that will be the case; but it'svital to understand that, sometimes, it won't be.

Acharacteristic feature of modernity is the subordination of purpose to accident— an acute appreciation of just how contingent and coincidental the connectionswe are taught to make often are. We understand, as moderns, that many of theways we carve up and organize the world reflect what our social history andcultural heritage, and perhaps our neurological wiring, bring to the world, andnot some irreducible «way things are.» A wonderful example comes froma 1966 essay by Jorge Louis Borges, «Other Inquisitions.» There, theessayist describes the following taxonomy of the animal kingdom, which hepurports to trace to an ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled “The CelestialEmporium of Benevolent Knowledge”:

On thoseremote pages it is written that animals are divided into:

a)

b)

c)

d)

e)

f)

g)

h)

i)

j)

k)

l)

m)

n)

Contemporarywriters from Michel Foucault, in “The Archaeology of Knowledge”, through GeorgeLakoff, in “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things”, use Borges' Chineseencyclopedia to illustrate a range of different propositions, but the core proposition is the supposedarbitrariness — the political character, in a sense — of all culturally imposedcategories.

At one level,that proposition expresses a profound truth and may encourage humility bycombating cultural imperialism. At another level, though, the proposition tellsa dangerous lie: it suggests that we have descended into the nihilism that soobsessed Nietzsche and other thinkers — a world where everything is relative, all lines are up for grabs, all principlesand connections are just matters of purely subjective preference or, worsestill, arbitrary convention. Whether we believe that killing animals for foodis wrong, for example, becomes a question indistinguishable from whether wehappen to enjoy eating beans, rice and tofu.

This is aparticularly pernicious notion in a era when we pass more and more of our livesin cyberspace, a place where, almost by definition, our most familiar landmarksare rearranged or disappear altogether — because there is a pervasive tendency,even (and perhaps especially) among the most enlightened, to forget that thehuman values and ideals to which we commit ourselves may indeed be universaland need not depend on how our particular cultures, or our latest technologies,carve up the universe we inhabit. It was my very wise colleague from Yale, thelate Art Leff, who once observed that, even in a world without an agreed-uponGod, we can still agree — even if we can't «prove» mathematically —that «napalming babies is wrong.»

TheConstitution's core values, I'm convinced, need not be transmogrified, ormetamorphosed into oblivion, in the dim recesses of cyberspace. But to say thatthey need not be lost there ishardly to predict that they will notbe. On the contrary, without further thought and awareness, the danger is clearand present that they will be.

The«event horizon» against which this transformation might occur isalready plainly visible:

Electronictrespassers like Kevin Mitnik don't stop with cracking pay phones, but breakinto NORAD — the North American Defense Command computer in Colorado Springs —not in a “WarGames” movie, but in real life.

Lesschallenging to national security but more ubiquitously threatening, computercrackers download everyman's credit history from institutions like TRW; startcharging phone calls (and more) to everyman's number; set loose«worm» programs that shut down thousands of linked computers; andspread «computer viruses» through everyman's work or home PC.

It is not onlythe government that feels threatened by «computer crime»; both theowners and the users of private information services, computer bulletin boards,gateways, and networks feel equally vulnerable to this new breed of invisibletrespasser. The response from the many who sense danger has been swift, andoften brutal, as a few examples illustrate.

Last March,U.S. Secret Service agents staged a surprise raid on Steve Jackson Games, asmall games manufacturer in Austin, Texas, and seized all paper and electronicdrafts of its newest fantasy role-playing game, “GURPS[reg.t.m.] Cyberpunk”,calling the game a «handbook for computer crime.»

By lastSpring, up to one quarter of the U.S. Treasury Department's investigators hadbecome involved in a project of eavesdropping on computer bulletin boards,apparently tracking notorious hackers like «Acid Phreak» and«Phiber Optik» through what one journalist dubbed «the darkcanyons of cyberspace.»

Last May, inthe now famous (or infamous) «Operation Sun Devil,» more than 150secret service agents teamed up with state and local law enforcement agencies,and with security personnel from AT&T, American Express, U.S. Sprint, and anumber of the regional Bell telephone companies, armed themselves with over twodozen search warrants and more than a few guns, and seized 42 computers and23,000 floppy discs in 14 cities from New York to Texas. Their target: aloose-knit group of people in their teens and twenties, dubbed the «Legionof Doom.»

I am notdescribing an Indiana Jones movie. I'm talking about America in the 1990s.

The Problem

TheConstitution's architecture can too easily come to seem quaintly irrelevant, orat least impossible to take very seriously, in the world as reconstituted bythe microchip. I propose today to canvass five axioms of our constitutional law— five basic assumptions that I believe shape the way American constitutionalscholars and judges view legal issues — and to examine how they can adapt tothe cyberspace age. My conclusion (and I will try not to give away too much ofthe punch line here) is that the Framers of our Constitution were very wiseindeed. They bequeathed us a framework for all seasons, a truly astonishingdocument whose principles are suitable for all times and all technologicallandscapes.

Axiom 1:
There is a Vital Difference
Between Government and Private Action

The firstaxiom I will discuss is the proposition that the Constitution, with the soleexception of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery, regulates action bythe government rather than theconduct of private individuals andgroups. In an article I wrote in the Harvard Law Review in November 1989 on«The Curvature of Constitutional Space,» I discussed theConstitution's metaphor-morphosis from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian andHeisenbergian paradigm. It was common, early in our history, to see theConstitution as «Newtonian in design with its carefully counterpoisedforces and counterforces, its [geographical and institutional] checks andbalances.» (103 “Harv. L. Rev.” at 3.)

Indeed, inmany ways contemporary constitutional law is still trapped within and stuntedby that paradigm. But today at least some post-modern constitutionalists tendto think and talk in the language of relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaostheory. This may quite naturally suggest to some observers that theConstitution's basic strategy of decentralizing and diffusing power byconstraining and fragmenting governmental authority in particular has beenrendered obsolete.

Theinstitutional separation of powers among the three federal branches ofgovernment, the geographical division of authority between the federalgovernment and the fifty state governments, the recognition of nationalboundaries, and, above all, the sharp distinction between the public andprivate spheres, become easy to deride as relics of a simpler, pre-computerage. Thus Eli Noam, in the First Ithiel de Sola Pool Memorial Lecture,delivered last October at MIT, notes that computer networks and networkassociations acquire quasi-governmental powers as they necessarily take on suchtasks as mediating their members' conflicting interests, establishing costshares, creating their own rules of admission and access and expulsion, evenestablishing their own de factotaxing mechanisms. In Professor Noam's words, «networks become politicalentities,» global nets that respect no state or local boundaries.Restrictions on the use of information in one country (to protect privacy, forexample) tend to lead to export of that information to other countries, whereit can be analyzed and then used on a selective basis in the country attemptingto restrict it. «Data havens» reminiscent of the role played by theSwiss in banking may emerge, with few restrictions on the storage andmanipulation of information.

A temptingconclusion is that, to protect the free speech and other rights of users in such private networks, judgesmust treat these networks not as associations that have rights of their own against the government but as virtual«governments» in themselves — as entities against which individualrights must be defended in the Constitution's name. Such a conclusion would bemisleadingly simplistic. There are circumstances, of course, when non-governmentalbodies like privately owned «company towns» or even huge shoppingmalls should be subjected to legislative and administrative controls bydemocratically accountable entities, or even to judicial controls as thoughthey were arms of the state — but that may be as true (or as false) ofmultinational corporations or foundations, or transnational religiousorganizations, or even small-town communities, as it is of computer-mediatednetworks. It's a fallacy to suppose that, just because a computer bulletinboard or network or gateway is somethinglike a shopping mall, government has as much constitutional duty — or evenauthority — to guarantee open public access to such a network as it has toguarantee open public access to a privately owned shopping center like the oneinvolved in the U.S. Supreme Court's famous “PruneYard Shopping Center”decision of 1980, arising from nearby San Jose.

The rules oflaw, both statutory and judge-made, through which each state allocates private powers andresponsibilities themselves represent characteristic forms of governmentaction. That's why a state's rules for imposing liability on privatepublishers, or for deciding which private contracts to enforce and which onesto invalidate, are all subject to scrutiny for their consistency with thefederal Constitution. But as a general proposition it is only what governments do, either through suchrules or through the actions of public officials, that the United StatesConstitution constrains. And nothing about any new technology suddenly erasesthe Constitution's enduring value of restraining government above all else, and of protecting all private groups,large and small, from government.

It's true thatcertain technologies may become socially indispensable — so that equal or atleast minimal access to basic computer power, for example, might be assignificant a constitutional goal as equal or at least minimal access to thefranchise, or to dispute resolution through the judicial system, or toelementary and secondary education. But all this means (or should mean) is thatthe Constitution's constraints on government must at times take the form ofimposing affirmative duties toassure access rather than merely enforcing negativeprohibitions against designated sorts of invasion or intrusion.

Today, forexample, the government is under an affirmative obligation to open up criminaltrials to the press and the public, at least where there has not been aparticularized finding that such openness would disrupt the proceedings. Thegovernment is also under an affirmative obligation to provide free legalassistance for indigent criminal defendants, to assure speedy trials, tounderwrite the cost of counting ballots at election time, and to desegregatepreviously segregated school systems. But these occasional affirmativeobligations don't, or shouldn't, mean that the Constitution's axiomaticdivision between the realm of public power and the realm of private life shouldbe jettisoned.

Nor would the«indispensability» of information technologies provide a license forgovernment to impose strict content, access, pricing, and other types ofregulation. Books are indispensableto most of us, for example — but it doesn't follow that government shouldtherefore be able to regulate the content of what goes onto the shelves of bookstores. The right of a privatebookstore owner to decide which books to stock and which to discard, whichbooks to display openly and which to store in limited access areas, shouldremain inviolate. And note, incidentally, that this needn't make the bookstore ownera «publisher» who is liable for the words printed in the books on hershelves. It's a common fallacy to imagine that the moment a computer gateway orbulletin board begins to exercise powers of selection to control who may be online, it must automatically assume the responsibilities of a newscaster, abroadcaster, or an author. For computer gateways and bulletin boards are reallythe «bookstores» of cyberspace; most of them organize and presentinformation in a computer format, rather than generating more informationcontent of their own.

Axiom 2:
The Constitutional Boundaries of Private Property
and Personality Depend on Variables Deeper Than
Social Utility and TechnologicalFeasibility

The secondconstitutional axiom, one closely related to the private-public distinction ofthe first axiom, is that a person's mind, body, and property belong to that person and not to the public asa whole. Some believe that cyberspace challenges that axiom because its entirepremise lies in the existence of computers tied to electronic transmissionnetworks that process digital information. Because such information can beeasily replicated in series of «1»s and «0»s, anything thatanyone has come up with in virtual reality can be infinitely reproduced. I canlog on to a computer library, copy a «virtual book» to my computerdisk, and send a copy to your computer without creating a gap on anyone'sbookshelf. The same is true of valuable computer programs, costing hundreds ofdollars, creating serious piracy problems. This feature leads some, likeRichard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, to argue that in cyberspaceeverything should be free — that information can't be owned. Others, of course,argue that copyright and patent protections of various kinds are needed inorder for there to be incentives to create «cyberspace property» inthe first place.

Needless tosay, there are lively debates about what the optimal incentive package shouldbe as a matter of legislative and social policy. But the only constitutional issue, at bottom, isn'tthe utilitarian or instrumental selection of an optimal policy. Socialjudgments about what ought to be subject to individual appropriation, in thesense used by John Locke and Robert Nozick, and what ought to remain in theopen public domain, are first and foremost politicaldecisions.

To be sure,there are some constitutional constraints on these political decisions. TheConstitution does not permit anything and everything to be made into a private commodity. Votes, for example,theoretically cannot be bought and sold. Whether the Constitution itself shouldbe read (or amended) so as to permit all basic medical care, shelter,nutrition, legal assistance and, indeed, computerized information services, tobe treated as mere commodities, available only to the highest bidder, are allterribly hard questions — as the Eastern Europeans are now discovering as theyattempt to draft their own constitutions. But these are not questions thatshould ever be confused with issues of what is technologically possible, aboutwhat is realistically enforceable, or about what is socially desirable.

Similarly, theConstitution does not permit anything and everything to be socialized and made into a public good available to whoever needsor «deserves» it most. I would hope, for example, that the governmentcould not use its powers of eminent domain to «take» live body partslike eyes or kidneys or brain tissue for those who need transplants and wouldbe expected to lead particularly productive lives. In any event, I feel certainthat whatever constitutional right each of us has to inhabit his or her ownbody and to hold onto his or her own thoughts and creations should not dependsolely on cost-benefit calculations, or on the availability of technologicalmethods for painlessly effecting transfers or for creating good artificialsubstitutes.

Axiom 3:
Government May Not Control InformationContent

A thirdconstitutional axiom, like the first two, reflects a deep respect for theintegrity of each individual and a healthy skepticism toward government. Theaxiom is that, although information and ideas have real effects in the socialworld, it's not up to government to pick and choose for us in terms of the content of that information or the value of those ideas.

This notion issometimes mistakenly reduced to the naive child's ditty that «sticks andstones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.» Anybody who'sever been called something awful by children in a schoolyard knows better thanto believe any such thing. The real basis for First Amendment values isn't thefalse premise that information and ideas have no real impact, but the beliefthat information and ideas are tooimportant to entrust to any government censor or overseer.

If we keepthat in mind, and only if we keepthat in mind, will we be able to see through the tempting argument that, in theInformation Age, free speech is a luxury we can no longer afford. That argumentbecomes especially tempting in the context of cyberspace, where sequences of «0»sand «1»s may become virtual life forms. Computer «viruses»roam the information nets, attaching themselves to various programs and screwingup computer facilities. Creation of a computer virus involves writing aprogram; the program then replicates itself and mutates. The electronic codeinvolved is very much like DNA. If information content is «speech,»and if the First Amendment is to apply in cyberspace, then mustn't theseviruses be «speech» — and mustn't their writing and dissemination beconstitutionally protected? To avoid that nightmarish outcome, mustn't we saythat the First Amendment is inapplicableto cyberspace?

The answer isno. Speech is protected, but deliberately yelling «Boo!» at a cardiacpatient may still be prosecuted as murder. Free speech is a constitutionalright, but handing a bank teller a hold-up note that says, «Your money oryour life,» may still be punished as robbery. Stealing someone's diary maybe punished as theft — even if you intend to publish it in book form. And theSupreme Court, over the past fifteen years, has gradually brought advertisingwithin the ambit of protected expression without preventing the government fromprotecting consumers from deceptive advertising. The lesson, in short, is thatconstitutional principles are subtle enough to bend to such concerns. Theyneedn't be broken or tossed out.

Axiom 4:
The Constitution is Founded on Normative
Conceptions of Humanity That Advances
in Science and Technology Cannot«Disprove»

A fourthconstitutional axiom is that the human spirit is something beyond a physicalinformation processor. That axiom, which regards human thought processes as notfully reducible to the operations of a computer program, however complex, mustnot be confused with the silly view that, because computer operations involvenothing more than the manipulation of «on» and «off» statesof myriad microchips, it somehow follows that government control or outrightseizure of computers and computer programs threatens no First Amendment rightsbecause human thought processes are not directly involved. To say that would belike saying that government confiscation of a newspaper's printing press andtomorrow morning's copy has nothing to do with speech but involves only ataking of metal, paper, and ink. Particularly if the seizure or the regulationis triggered by the content of the information being processed or transmitted,the First Amendment is of course fully involved. Yet this recognition thatinformation processing by computer entails something far beyond the meresequencing of mechanical or chemical steps still leaves a potential gap betweenwhat computers can do internally and in communication with one another — andwhat goes on within and between human minds. It is that gap to which thisfourth axiom is addressed; the very existence of any such gap is, as I'm sureyou know, a matter of considerable controversy.

What if peoplelike the mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, author of “The Emperor'sNew Mind”, are wrong about human minds? In that provocative recent book,Penrose disagrees with those Artificial Intelligence, or AI, gurus who insistthat it's only a matter of time until human thought and feeling can beperfectly simulated or even replicated by a series of purely physicaloperations — that it's all just neurons firing and neurotransmitters flowing,all subject to perfect modeling in suitable computer systems. Would an adherentof that AI orthodoxy, someone whom Penrose fails to persuade, have to reject asirrelevant for cyberspace those constitutional protections that rest on theanti-AI premise that minds are notreducible to really fancy computers?

Consider, forexample, the Fifth Amendment, which provides that «no person shall be... compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.» TheSupreme Court has long held that suspects may be required, despite thisprotection, to provide evidence that is not «testimonial» in nature —blood samples, for instance, or even exemplars of one's handwriting or voice.Last year, in a case called “Pennsylvania v. Muniz”, the Supreme Court heldthat answers to even simple questions like «When was your sixthbirthday?» are testimonial because such a question, howeverstraightforward, nevertheless calls for the product of mental activity andtherefore uses the suspect's mind against him. But what if science couldeventually describe thinking as a process no more complex than, say, riding abike or digesting a meal? Might the progress of neurobiology and computerscience eventually overthrow the premises of the “Muniz” decision?

I would hopenot. For the Constitution's premises, properly understood, are normative rather than descriptive. The philosopher David Humewas right in teaching that no «ought» can ever be logically derivedfrom an «is.» If we should ever abandon the Constitution's protectionfor the distinctively and universally human, it won't be because robotics orgenetic engineering or computer science have led us to deeper truths, butrather because they have seduced us into more profound confusions. Science andtechnology open options, create possibilities, suggest incompatibilities,generate threats. They do not alter what is «right» or what is«wrong.» The fact that those notions are elusive and subject toendless debate need not make them totally contingent on contemporarytechnology.

Axiom 5:
Constitutional Principles Should Not
Vary With Accidents of Technology

In a sense,that's the fifth and final constitutional axiom I would urge upon thisgathering: that the Constitution's norms, at their deepest level, must beinvariant under merely technologicaltransformations. Our constitutional law evolves through judicialinterpretation, case by case, in a process of reasoning by analogy fromprecedent. At its best, that process is ideally suited to seeing beneath thesurface and extracting deeper principles from prior decisions. At its worst,though, the same process can get bogged down in superficial aspects ofpreexisting examples, fixating upon unessential features while overlookingunderlying principles and values.

When theSupreme Court in 1928 first confronted wiretapping and held in “Olmstead v.United States” that such wiretapping involved no «search» or«seizure» within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of«unreasonable searches and seizures,» the majority of the Courtreasoned that the Fourth Amendment «itself shows that the search is to beof material things — the person, the house, his papers or his effects,»and said that «there was no searching» when a suspect's phone wastapped because the Constitution's language «cannot be extended andexpanded to include telephone wires reaching to the whole world from thedefendant's house or office.» After all, said the Court, the interveningwires «are not part of his house or office any more than are the highwaysalong which they are stretched.» Even to a law student in the 1960s, asyou might imagine, that «reasoning» seemed amazingly artificial. Yetthe “Olmstead” doctrine still survived.

It would beilluminating at this point to compare the Supreme Court's initial reaction tonew technology in “Olmstead” with its initial reaction to new technology in “Marylandv. Craig”, the 1990 closed-circuit television case with which we began thisdiscussion. In “Craig”, a majority of the Justices assumed that, when the 18th-century Framers of the Confrontation Clause included a guarantee of two-way physical confrontation, they did sosolely because it had not yet become technologically feasible for the accusedto look his accuser in the eye without having the accuser simultaneously watchthe accused. Given that this technological obstacle has been removed, the majorityassumed, one-way confrontation is now sufficient. It is enough that the accusednot be subject to criminal conviction on the basis of statements made outsidehis presence.

In “Olmstead”,a majority of the Justices assumed that, when the 18th-century authors of theFourth Amendment used language that sounded «physical» inguaranteeing against invasions of a person's dwelling or possessions, they didso not solely because physicalinvasions were at that time the only serious threats to personal privacy, butfor the separate and distinct reason that intangibleinvasions simply would not threaten any relevant dimension of Fourth Amendmentprivacy.

In a sense,“Olmstead” mindlessly read a new technology out of the Constitution, while “Craig” absent-mindedly read a newtechnology into the Constitution.But both decisions — “Olmstead” and “Craig” — had the structural effect ofwithholding the protections of the Bill of Rights from threats made possible bynew information technologies. “Olmstead” did so by implausibly reading theConstitution's text as though it represented a deliberate decision not toextend protection to threats that 18th-century thinkers simply had notforeseen. “Craig” did so by somewhat more plausibly — but still unthinkingly —treating the Constitution's seemingly explicit coupling of two analyticallydistinct protections as reflecting a failure of technological foresight andimagination, rather than a deliberate value choice.

The “Craig”majority's approach appears to have been driven in part by an understandablesense of how a new information technology could directly protect a particularlysympathetic group, abused children, from a traumatic trial experience. The“Olmstead” majority's approach probably reflected both an exaggerated estimateof how difficult it would be to obtain wiretapping warrants even where fullyjustified, and an insufficient sense of how a new information technology coulddirectly threaten all of us. Although both “Craig” and “Olmstead” reveal aninadequate consciousness about how new technologies interact with old values,“Craig” at least seems defensible even if misguided, while “Olmstead” seemsjust plain wrong.

Around 23years ago, as a then-recent law school graduate serving as law clerk to SupremeCourt Justice Potter Stewart, I found myself working on a case involving thegovernment's electronic surveillance of a suspected criminal — in the form of atiny device attached to the outside of a public telephone booth. Because theinvasion of the suspect's privacy was accomplished without physical trespassinto a «constitutionally protected area,» the Federal Governmentargued, relying on “Olmstead”, that there had been no «search» or«seizure,» and therefore that the Fourth Amendment «right of thepeople to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, againstunreasonable searches and seizures,» simply did not apply.

At first,there were only four votes to overrule “Olmstead” and to hold the FourthAmendment applicable to wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping. I'm proud tosay that, as a 26-year-old kid, I had at least a little bit to do with changingthat number from four to seven — and with the argument, formally adopted by aseven-Justice majority in December 1967, that the Fourth Amendment «protectspeople, not places.» (389 U.S. at 351.) In that decision, “Katz v. UnitedStates”, the Supreme Court finally repudiated “Olmstead” and the many decisionsthat had relied upon it and reasoned that, given the role of electronictelecommunications in modern life, the First Amendment purposes of protecting free speech as well as the FourthAmendment purposes of protecting privacyrequire treating as a «search» any invasion of a person'sconfidential telephone communications, with or without physical trespass.

Sadly, nineyears later, in “Smith v. Maryland”, the Supreme Court retreated from the“Katz” principle by holding that no search occurs and therefore no warrant isneeded when police, with the assistance of the telephone company, make use of a«pen register», a mechanical device placed on someone's phone linethat records all numbers dialed from the phone and the times of dialing. TheSupreme Court, over the dissents of Justices Stewart, Brennan, and Marshall,found no legitimate expectation of privacy in the numbers dialed, reasoningthat the digits one dials are routinely recorded by the phone company forbilling purposes. As Justice Stewart, the author of “Katz”, aptly pointed out,«that observation no more than describes the basic nature of telephonecalls.... It is simply not enough to say, after “Katz”, that there is nolegitimate expectation of privacy in the numbers dialed because the callerassumes the risk that the telephone company will expose them to thepolice.» (442 U.S. at 746-747.) Today, the logic of “Smith” is being usedto say that people have no expectation of privacy when they use their cordlesstelephones since they know or should know that radio waves can be easilymonitored!

It is easy tobe pessimistic about the way in which the Supreme Court has reacted totechnological change. In many respects, “Smith” is unfortunately more typicalthan “Katz” of the way the Court has behaved. For example, when movies wereinvented, and for several decades thereafter, the Court held that movie exhibitionswere not entitled to First Amendment protection. When community access cable TVwas born, the Court hindered municipal attempts to provide it at low cost byholding that rules requiring landlords to install small cable boxes on theirapartment buildings amounted to a compensable taking of property. And in “RedLion v. FCC”, decided twenty-two years ago but still not repudiated today, theCourt ratified government control of TV and radio broadcast content with thedubious logic that the scarcity of the electromagnetic spectrum justified notmerely government policies to auction off, randomly allocate, or otherwiseration the spectrum according to neutral rules, but also much more intrusiveand content-based government regulation in the form of the so-called«fairness doctrine.»

Although theSupreme Court and the lower federal courts have taken a somewhat moreenlightened approach in dealing with cable television, these decisions for themost part reveal a curious judicial blindness, as if the Constitution had to bereinvented with the birth of each new technology. Judges interpreting a late18th century Bill of Rights tend to forget that, unless its terms are read in an evolving anddynamic way, its values will loseeven the static protection they onceenjoyed. Ironically, fidelity tooriginal values requires flexibilityof textual interpretation. It was Judge Robert Bork, not famous for hisflexibility, who once urged this enlightened view upon then Justice Scalia,when the two of them sat as colleagues on the U.S. Court of Appeals for theD.C. Circuit.

Judicial errorin this field tends to take the form of saying that, by using modern technologyranging from the telephone to the television to computers, we «assume therisk.» But that typically begs the question. Justice Harlan, in a dissentpenned two decades ago, wrote: «Since it is the task of the law to formand project, as well as mirror and reflect, we should not... merely recite... risks without examining the desirabilityof saddling them upon society.» (“United States v. White”, 401 U.S. at786). And, I would add, we should not merely recite risks without examining howimposing those risks comports with the Constitution's fundamental values of freedom, privacy, and equality.

Failing toexamine just that issue is the basic error I believe federal courts andCongress have made:

The lesson tobe learned is that these choices and these mistakes are not dictated by theConstitution. They are decisions for us to make in interpreting that majesticcharter, and in implementing the principles that the Constitution establishes.

Conclusion

If my own lifeas a lawyer and legal scholar could leave just one legacy, I'd like it to bethe recognition that the Constitution asa whole «protects people, not places.» If that is to come about,the Constitution as a whole must be read through a technologically transparentlens. That is, we must embrace, as a rule of construction or interpretation, aprinciple one might call the «cyberspace corollary.» It would make asuitable Twenty-seventh Amendment to the Constitution, one befitting the 200thanniversary of the Bill of Rights. Whether adopted all at once as aconstitutional amendment, or accepted gradually as a principle ofinterpretation that I believe should obtain even without any formal change inthe Constitution's language, the corollary I would propose would do for technology in 1991 what I believe theConstitution's Ninth Amendment, adopted in 1791, was meant to do for text.

The NinthAmendment says: «The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights,shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by thepeople.» That amendment provides added support for the long-debated, butnow largely accepted, «right of privacy» that the Supreme Courtrecognized in such decisions as the famous birth control case of 1965,“Griswold v. Connecticut”. The Ninth Amendment's simple message is: The text used by the Constitution's authorsand ratifiers does not exhaust the values our Constitution recognizes. Perhapsa Twenty-seventh Amendment could convey a parallel and equally simple message:The technologies familiar to theConstitution's authors and ratifiers similarly do not exhaust the threats against which theConstitution's core values must be protected.

The mostrecent amendment, the twenty-sixth, adopted in 1971, extended the vote to18-year-olds. It would be fitting, in a world where youth has beenenfranchised, for a twenty-seventh amendment to spell a kind of«childhood's end» for constitutional law. The Twenty-seventhAmendment, to be proposed for at least serious debate in 1991, would readsimply:

«ThisConstitution's protections for the freedoms of speech, press, petition, andassembly, and its protections against unreasonable searches and seizures andthe deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, shallbe construed as fully applicable without regard to the technological method ormedium through which information content is generated, stored, altered,transmitted, or controlled.»

Конституция в киберпространстве:

закон и свобода за электронной границей

Введение

Моя тема — как«наложить» текст и структуру нашей Конституции на текстуру итопологию «киберпространства». Это термин, созданный автором киберпанковских новелл Уильямом Гибсоном,который сейчас широко используется для обозначения «места» — местабез физических стен и физических измерений — где «происходит» обычнаятелефонная беседа, где сообщенияголосовой и электронной почты путешествуют туда и обратно, и гдесгенерированная компьютером графика передается и трансформируется,взаимодействуя, как в реальном времени, так и с задержкой, среди бесчисленныхпользователей, а также между пользователями и самим компьютером.

Некоторыеиспользуют понятие «киберпространства», чтобы обозначитьфантастические миры, или «виртуальные реальности», хорошо описанныеГибсоном в его романе “Neuromancer”, в котором люди по существу могутпревращать свой мозг в периферийные устройства компьютера, способные получать иобрабатывать данные. В целом идея«виртуальной реальности,» конечно, звучит немного странно. Как спросил один из наиболее запоминающихсягероев Лили Томлин: «Реальность ли это или коллективноепомешательство?». Работа в этомнаправлении делается в основном людьми, которые разделяют известное мнение, чтореальность переоценена!

Тем не менее,может быть, «киберпространство» означает для некоторых пользователейсвоего рода технологии, над которыми работают люди в Силиконовой Долине (какДжейрон Ланье из Компании VPL Research, например), когда они пытаютсяразработать «виртуальную игру» для инвалидов, системы САПР, которыепозволяют архитекторам ходить по «виртуальным зданиям» и переделыватьих прежде, чем они построены,«виртуальные переговоры» для деловых совещаний, или может бытькогда-нибудь даже «виртуальные детские сады» для запертых домадетей. Пользователь надевает очки,подключенные к мощному компьютеру, вместе со специальным комплектом электронныхперчаток (и возможно другим устройством), подключенным к этому же компьютеру,и, выглядя похожим на героя фильма «Звездные войны», совершает первыешаги в управляемую компьютером, трехмерную, интерактивную, бесконечнорасширяемую галлюцинацию ненаркотической природы, которую можно видеть, слышатьи трогать — позволяющую пользователю буквально перемещаться сквозь информацию иощущать ее.

Я используютермин «киберпространство» гораздо более широко, чем многие впоследнее время. Я его использую, чтобы охватить полный объем распространяемыхс помощью компьютеров звуков и/или изображений, которые уже широко рассеялись всовременном обществе — начиная от вещей таких же вездесущих как обычныйтелефон, и заканчивая вещами, которые все еще не распространились широкоподобно компьютерным доскам объявлений и сетям как Prodigy, или как WELL(«Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link»), основанная здесь в Сан-Франциско. Вобщем и целом моя тема — вовлечение этого быстро распространяющегося проявленияв наш конституционный порядок. Это тот конституционный порядок, который делитобщественную, юридическую, и политическую вселенную по границам«физического места» или «временной близости». Особенностоит заметить, что эти самые границы в киберпространстве теряют форму или совсемисчезают. Вопрос, следовательно, таков: когда границы, по которым написана нашаКонституция, искажаются или исчезают, что случается с самой Конституцией?

Установка Этапа

Чтобыустановить этап с помощью, быть может, неизвестного примера, рассмотримрешение, вынесенное девять месяцев тому назад в процессе “штат Мериленд противКрейга”, где Верховный Суд Соединенных Штатов отстоял честь штата, установивпредполагаемое злоупотребление ребенком в суде с обвинителем, дававшимпоказания не в присутствии обвиняемого, а по одностороннему закрытомутелевидению. Шестая Поправка, которая,конечно, предшествовала телевидению на полтора столетия, гласит: «Во всехуголовных обвинениях обвиняемый должен иметь право.. . лично быть ознакомлен со свидетельствующимипротив него». Судья О'Коннор написал для незначительного большинства изпяти Судей, что государственные процедуры, тем не менее, подвели справедливыйбаланс между издержками для обвиняемого и пользой для жертвы и общества вцелом. Судья Скалиа, объединившись затем в Суде с тремя «либералами»(Бреннаном, Маршаллом и Стивенсом), возражал против такого подхода к толкованиюШестой Поправки с позиции издержек-пользы. Он написал:

Суд убедительно доказал, что Мэрилендскаяпроцедура служит законным интересам и дает обвиняемому фактически все гарантииСтатьи об Очной Ставке (все, кроме очной ставки). Я убежден, следовательно, чтоМэрилендская процедура фактически является конституционной. Поскольку фактически она, тем не менее, неконституционная, я [возражаю].

Возможно ли,что высокотехнологичное, закрытое телевидение, так же знакомое самому молодомусудье в составе суда, как его таким же молодым сотрудникам, должно было быиметь некоторое отношение к хитрому вызову Судьи Скалиа «виртуальной»конституционной реальности? Даже если быСудья Скалиа не употребил словосочетание «виртуальная реальность», ая подозреваю, что не употребил, его несогласное мнение о Статье об Очной Ставкетребует от нас “поставить передсобой” снова приходящую на ум задачу, как конституционные положения, записанныедва столетия тому назад, должны истолковываться и применяться в постоянноменяющихся обстоятельствах.

Должна литехнологическая навязчивая идея издержек-пользы современного общества принижатьстаромодное значение прямой очной ставки, которая Конституцией на видсохраняется как первостепенная? Я надеюсь, что нет. В этом отношении я полностью согласен сСудьей Скалиа.

Но новыетехнологические возможности видеть вашего обвинителя при том, что вашобвинитель совершенно не видит Вас, — возможности оградить обвинителя от любыхнеудобств, от которых обвинитель не мог быть огражден прежде, чем односторонне прозрачные зеркалаили закрытое телевидение были разработаны — должны привести нас к вопросу самим себе, действительно ли двухсторонняя очная ставка, в которойваш обвинитель чувствует себя неудобно, и таким образом его ложь менеевероятна, является сутью значенияСтатьи об Очной Ставке. Если так, то «виртуальная» очная ставкадолжна быть признана конституционно недостаточной. Если нет — еслисуть значения, удовлетворяющего Статье об Очной Ставке, это именно возможность видеть вашего обвинителя, когда онговорит, что Вы это сделали, — тогда «виртуальная» очная ставка былабы достаточной. Новые технологии должны заставить нас взглянуть болеепристально именно на те значения Конституции,которые нужно сохранить… Новые технологии недолжны заставлять нас реагировать рефлексивно в любом случае — и в случае, когда мы допускаем, что Составители незнали о технологиях, когда делали свои выводы и ценности абсолютными, и в случае,когда мы допускаем, что эти новые технологии не могут, возможно, подсказатьновые пути выхода из старых дилемм и, следовательно, должны бытьпроигнорированы.

Одностороннепрозрачное зеркало дает отличную метафору для той задачи, которая стоит переднами. Как постановил Верховный Суд вдругом случае несколько лет тому назад, «присутствующее здесь отражение взеркале требует от нас пройти сквозь аналитическое зеркало, чтобы понятьего». (“NCAA против Тарканиана”, 109 S. Ct. at 462.). Миром, в котором СтатьяШестой Поправки об Очной Ставке была записана и ратифицирована, был мир, вкотором «процесс очной ставки» с вашим обвинителем обязательно означал одновременноефизическое противостояние, при котором ваш обвинитель должен осознавать, что он обвиняет Вас. Замкнутое телевидение и одностороннепрозрачные зеркала изменили все это путем разделенияэтих двух измерений очной ставки, обозначая сдвиг в условиях передачиинформации, который часто встречается в киберпространстве.

Что означаеттакой сдвиг для конституционного анализа? Общая реакция — это рассматриватьшаблон, существовавший до появленияновой технологии (шаблон, по которому, сказав «A», обязательно нужносказать «Б») как по существу произвольный или случайный. При такомподходе, если однажды технологическое изменение сделает возможным сказать«A» без «Б» —увидеть вашего обвинителя без возможности для него или ее видеть Вас, или, вкачестве другого примера, читать чью-топочту без ее ведома — можно заключить, что «старое»Конституционное положение о «Б» неуместно; можно также заключить, чтодля правительства достаточно гарантировать только «A». Иногда делобудет обстоять именно так, но сущест

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