Power dynamics, cyberspace, and civil liberties: Motivations

• Economic
  • Revelation of trade secrets (e.g., the Scientologists). In a traditional corporate setting, the logical response to someone who reveals trade secrets is to sue the person who revealed them. However, since in this case the revelations take place on the Internet, the Scientologists have taken to suing those who carry the traffic.
  • Risk aversion (e.g., the Medical Information Bureau and the Medical Records Institute). The motivation here is the collection and disbursement of as much information about individuals as possible, to enable insurance companies to avoid insuring absolutely anyone who might cost more than the minimal case. (Some might argue that insuring the sick is the whole point of medical insurance, but this is not the approach taken by the industry, whose motivation is, after all, profit.)
  • Lawsuits (e.g., the CMU BBoard-censorship case, in which CMU's actions are apparently motivated entirely by the fear of getting sued, and (somewhat) rationalized later as a moral decision. This becomes clear when one examines the chronology of events, in which CMU took action only after hearing that someone might bring suit against them, no matter how tenuous the charges.
  • Reputations (e.g., the green-card lawyers). In this case, Canter and Siegel have aggressively pursued those who have asserted that spamming the Internet is a socially reprehensible act. C&S assert that deliberate multiple- (as opposed to cross-) posting, and posting to every group, regardless of relevance, is their right---though they do not extend such rights to their detractors.
• Moral. Arguments of this sort usually invoke the "four horsemen of the NII", namely
  • Drug dealers
  • Organized crime
  • Unnamed foreign terrorists
  • Child porn
  Lately, they have also invoked domestic terrorism as well, despite the apparent rapidity and ease of the current suspect-gathering phase (and the apparent evidence that the Internet was not involved anyway).
• Military
  • At the moment, the primary military motivation appears to be in cryptographic policies, implemented via ITAR & export control and key escrow. This is a delaying action only; it is obvious that noncommercial strong cryptography is out of the bag. The purpose of the delay is to prevent widespread commercial adoption of strong cryptography, hence restricting it only to technically knowledgeable governments and terrorists---not much of a restriction, considering PGP.

    A potential additional motive is that any delay raises the chances of practical quantum computation, which would enable breaking prime-factoring and discrete-logarithm algorithms (which make up most of quantum cryptography) in polynomial (hence practical) time. (Of course, while quantum cryptography can help even the odds again, it requires quantum hardware, which is hardly common.)