"The inventor of the world wide web believes an online "Magna Carta" is needed to protect and enshrine the independence of the medium he created and the rights of its users worldwide.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the Guardian the web had come under increasing attack from governments and corporate influence and that new rules were needed to protect the "open, neutral" system.
Speaking exactly 25 years after he wrote the first draft of the first proposal for what would become the world wide web, the computer scientist said: "We need a global constitution – a bill of rights."
"Unless we have an open, neutral internet we can rely on without worrying about what's happening at the back door, we can't have open government, good democracy, good healthcare, connected communities and diversity of culture.""
... "Berners-Lee has been an outspoken critic of the American and British spy agencies' surveillance of citizens following the revelations by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. In the light of what has emerged, he said, people were looking for an overhaul of how the security services were managed."
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/12/online-magna-carta-berners-lee-web
I hesitate to claim the crown from tbl but i wrote about the need for a constitution for cyberspace in 2001 invoking Magna Carta amongst other precedents. The key notion of my constitution being that we need a secure device in order to secure our digital identity, our property and what we call liberty:
"In thinking about a Constitution for Cyberspace, it is best to start by making a statement of principle: I think that the most reliable wisdoms are those that are received, rather than those that are invented. Experience is the hardest taskmaster. Any document that purports to describe a set of truths is the better for having been tested before it is written. Magna Carta did not drop down from the sky: it was a statement of liberties that had been developing over centuries, and its terms can be traced back as far as pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon lawcodes like II Cnut, and perhaps further. The US Constitution was written as part of the same tradition, many centuries on and many errors and discoveries later.
This Cyber-Constitution, then, is based on the gurgling-up of rules, rather than on any particular form of poetic inspiration. What is different here is that we are trying to apply these ideas about society in a setting that is new. Many of the attributes of cyberspace are different from the ones we experience in the world: the quality of continuousness, the connectedness of all users, massive processing power.
The trustworthy architecture restores some familiarity to the picture: in this setting a person can establish their identity, property rights can be preserved, commerce can thrive and a government is able to provide some of the sorts of protections and prohibitions, as well as the exceptions to them, that are its function. And we have also seen that, subject to these common rules, users can flex the system to their own ends, so that for instance they can demand access to location information, or take advantage of government-mandated exceptions (adult entertainment, say).
My basic prescription, then, depends on a number of notions:
That a Constitution must be based on a hierarchical power structure. Universal agreements have the highest place, governments the second and users the third.
That some of the principles of a network Constitution have to be universal to have validity. Others are better expressed if they are expressed locally.
That the rules that territorial governments make do not fall within the ambit of the primary document. But they will nevertheless be part of the local Constitutional structure, dealing with things like minimal standards of privacy, protection and censorship, and rules about the use of location information, amongst other things.
That the component forces of liberty are sometimes incongruent, and hence the workings of the network demand that choices be made about which values are the most important.
That individuals may make choices of their own that will differ from the views of society as a whole. So long as they break no laws, there is no reason not to celebrate this variety.
That the Constitutional language of the tangible world is the law, but the language of cyberspace is technology. Translation is necessary."
- quote: alea
A Constitution for Cyberspace
2001/2
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