U.S. Transhumanist Party General Discussion Thread for 2022
The purpose of this post is to facilitate member comments pertaining to transhumanism and the U.S. Transhumanist Party (USTP), which might not specifically fit the subjects of any other post or article on the USTP website. This is the place for members to offer suggestions or converse about any areas of emerging technologies and their political, moral, societal, cultural, and esthetic implications. The general discussion thread is also an ideal location to suggest or propose platform planks that may be considered for future platform voting, and/or bring our attention to emerging legislative and societal developments that may affect the course and impact of emerging technologies.
The USTP will endeavor to open one of these general comment threads per year. This comment thread pertains to the year of 2022.
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I wrote up a few plank proposals regarding digital security, and some peripherals. I’m not a legal expert (and that probably shows in the writing), and hence I probably mixed up things like ‘organizations’ and ‘institutions’. The point there though, is that it doesn’t only apply to private sector but also to public sector and government bodies.
Although some organizations and institutions take digital security seriously, many appear to consider it an afterthought. When using products or services it is nigh impossible for citizens to know which are ‘good’ ones, and which are not… unless they spend an exorbitant amount of time researching.
In case there are proposals that would overlap with existing ones, I’d personally advocate to have them merged if adopted to minimize clutter.
I’ve tried to somewhat categorize the different security focused plank proposals.
Public Money for Public Code
The US Transhumanist Party supports the implementation of the ‘Public Money for Public Code’ concept, contending that public money should where reasonably possible, come to benefit the public first and foremost, and secondarily might also benefit other parties as well.
Public code is understood as code that is publicly available and more commonly referred to as Open Source, for example under the GPLv3 (General Public License version 3). The reasoning of ‘Public Money for Public Code’ is that public money should not be spent on proprietary software that benefits a select group of companies, but rather used to support Open-Source projects that are an alternative to the proprietary software. As Open-Source software is available for free to the public, said stimulus of open-source software could benefit both the public as well as public institutions. An example here could be an alternative to Microsoft Office, such as LibreOffice.
Many Open-Source projects operate on volunteers contributing to the project’s efforts. Opening up the possibility to receive funding for a project could incentivize more people to contribute to a project, and perhaps even use contribution to open-source projects as a means of stable income. This incentives citizens to participate, as besides the admirable goal of doing good for the public, it also contributes to the participants’ livelihood, or help them decide to split their worktime between employee, and self-employed contributor.
Likewise, this might incentivize software companies to participate as well, as it can earn them revenue. It would, however, be important to observe that companies do not drown out individual contributors as this could have a detrimental effect on incentivizing public participation.
The public participation would be an important element of the ‘Public Money for Public Code’, as it would also be a public showcase to stimulate interest in programming in education and beyond.
Digital Security Standards
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts to establish an evolving digital security standard. The ‘standard’ would apply to the moment in time we would be in and across society, whereas the ‘evolving’ aspect would pertain to the need to have the framework for the digital security set up in such a manner that it is adaptable to technological improvements, updates so to speak. It would be appreciated to have experts and private entities with expertise on these matters to participate in the establishment of such standards.
• Elements that fall within the scope of digital security standards could be, but are not limited to:
• Hardware and Software development best practices regarding security of data and information.
• Physical access restrictions and security to stored digital information and content, such as servers.
• Password strength requirements.
• Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) standards, such as removing SMS verification.
• Minimum Encryption standards for data in transit, and data at rest.
Digital Security Public awareness
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts to better inform the public of the risks of weak security for the individual, their community, and the nation as a whole. Likewise, efforts to inform the public on what steps they can take themselves to improve security in an accessible format, and more comprehensive information for those interested in further personal research on the topic.
These efforts to inform the public are welcome regardless of which entity or party publishes it, under the stipulations that the presented information is factual, does not present misleading information, and presents a solution that can be implemented by the target audience (such as the public at large, or a specifically for businesses. The presented information may not smear other commercial or public solutions.
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts to introduce a mandate for private and public Institutions, organizations, businesses, and others to publicly and clearly accessible acknowledge whenever a data breach has been detected within 24 hours after first detection, and to make known which steps are being taken to mitigate the problem, and what is being done to prevent future occurrences. Merely offering a form of compensation alone to those affected is insufficient if the security issues themselves are not addressed.
Digital Security regulations
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts to improve the security of infrastructure, both the security of physical access as well as the digital monitoring of malicious activity, particularly external traffic.
The US Transhumanist party support efforts to motivate online services such as email and social media to improve their security measures, both on servers as well as for users. Such measures should include encrypting all transit and stored data, as well as mandating users create stronger passwords and incentivizing them to use Multi-Factor Authentication.
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts for social media to improve privacy settings, both in granularity, usability as well as awareness of such privacy features, for users. Better control of privacy can minimize the scaping of information, information that can be used for identifying targets by malicious actors, from websites.
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts to mandate the implementation of security features on devices, rather than them being optional. Security updates should be installed automatically by default unless the user has opted out. Devices should be encrypted by default.
Furthermore, devices should have a built-in minimum password strength measurement for the user to overcome, to help the user create a strong password for a device, and encourage Multi-Factor Authentication where possible.
Although some of these security measures are already implemented on some devices, on others it is not done often, such as router, modems and IoT devices.
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts to amend the laws applying to data retention. The amount of data and the duration at which data is retained makes those institutions that retain the data a more attractive target for malicious actors. Such data retention would apply to both internet traffic data as well as phone records.
The amendment to data retention laws would also mandate the encryption of the stored data, insofar as this is not already mandatory (I don’t know).
The physical or digital access to user data, both by law enforcement as well as employees at a company should be limited to a principle of least privilege model.
Right to be forgotten
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts to give citizens more comprehensive control over information on themselves, including the removal of personal data. Citizens can request online publications that are no longer relevant to the public interest to be removed.
Reporting and enforcement
Although it would be preferable for organizations to take security seriously themselves, this is often not the case. Banks, credit card, insurance, telecoms, and so on get breached on a regular basis. Offering users identity theft protection afterwards is not a bad step, but a band-aid, and apparently more lucrative than addressing the actual issue beforehand.
Law enforcements appears to be more interested in having access to data than to prevent malicious actors from being able to gain access to such data.
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts to change government agencies efforts to limit, oppose or undermine security initiatives by companies and businesses. Although their motives might be pure, to uncover criminal activity for example, it can in the process undermine security on a much larger scale. If government agencies can have access, so can malicious actors.
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts to increase penalties on institutions that violate data retention laws, do not address known security issues, or do not implement security updates. The current penalties for institutions are ‘a drop in the bucket’ for larger organizations. Instead, a percentage of revenue penalty model could be implemented.
Institutions that repeatedly suffer breaches might receive a court mandate to hire a digital security auditor (Cure53 for example).
The US Transhumanist Party supports efforts to create a security whistleblower initiative where a whistleblower can report known security issues that are not being addressed by a company, or government institution. This could also aid the whistleblower in the event that they would suffer negative consequences by their employer for addressing security issues.