Kenneth S. Rogerson

Policies for online privacy in the United States and the European Union

This article examines how public and private sector institutions in the United States and the European Union have reacted to public demand for increased and improved online privacy protection. We argue that self-regulatory attempts do not adequately protect privacy online and that legislative intervention, as is happening in the European Union, is not only a good idea for the United States, but may be necessary to secure future online exchange of personal information.

Internet Regulation Process Model: The Effect of Societies, Communities, and Governments

The Internet is often seen as borderless and unmanageable and, therefore, not fully understandable. Starting from the assumption that it can be understood, we begin an attempt to organize the Internet by characterizing it as a behavior space in which groups categorized as societies, communities, and governments interact. We emphasize the utility of organizing the Internet and focus specifically on attempts by societies, communities, and governments to regulate the flow of information. We posit an Internet regulation process model that, we believe, explains most of the efforts to regulate the Internet. In addition, we provide some insight into the relationships between and within the various groups involved. Our conclusions center on the observation that political power (especially Western political power) has been a defining factor in the regulation of the Internet as governments have played a prominent role in regulatory action.

Addressing the Negative Consequences of the Information Age Lessons from Karl Polanyi and the industrial revolutionA note on the politics of theorizing technology

One of the great dilemmas of the information age is the tension between two dynamics: (1) the tendency of information to be free-flowing and not to lose its value as it moves and (2) the tendency to want to control that flow of information in order to profit from its value. In 1944, Karl Polanyi identified similar contradictions in the industrial revolution, except the flowing material was capital instead of information. He spent a lifetime exposing what he felt to be the negative consequences of this increasingly free-flowing capital, the hallmark of a free market economy. He advocated for a welfare state in which government intervention is necessary to control these negative effects. Given issues of the information age such as the digital divide, the commoditization of information, and security and privacy, as well as the arguments of the proponents and critics of these issues, Polanyis concepts can provide insight into the complexities of increasingly technical and information-based societies.

Sources of Advocacy: When Does the Media Give Voice to Egyptian Advocacy NGOs?

We use quantitative text analysis methods to examine how a subset of advocacy NGOs were used as sources by Egyptian English-language media publications in the months following the 2011 uprising. Using a combination of manual classification and fully automated computational topic modeling, we reveal descriptive insights into patterns of sourcing by both state-owned and independent Egyptian media outlets. We find that NGOs are used as sources sparingly in comparison to overall journalistic output, but that the reporting that referenced these NGOs was not necessarily superficial or shallow. There is evidence that state-run media tends to be more superficial in its use of NGOs as sources while independent media are more likely to identify specific individuals and use direct quotes and paraphrases.

A Policymaking Process “Tug-of-War”: National Information Security Policies in Comparative Perspective

ABSTRACT There is tension between the ideal of government transparency and the need to protect vital information. What types of information do governments protect on national security grounds? What arguments do governments use to justify the protection of this information? What will influence an open government information policy as opposed to a closed information policy? Through an examination of more than 250 information security–related policies from around the world, it is clear that (a) all governments limit the flows of information, (b) there are different reasons for this, and (c) the reasons are not always correlated to government type. In other words, sometimes democracies and authoritarian countries limit the same types of information issues. The policies and policy discussions are dependent on a variety of actors and which actor(s) wield the strongest influence at the time, which makes them often get caught up in a policy “tug-of-war” that most often results in incremental policy change and implementation.