The Right to Anonymity in Political Activities

The complexity of the right to privacy is particularly striking when the issues at stake are, ultimately, other political rights and freedoms such as the right to free speech and the right of association. The surveillance of individuals and groups by the state has strong political consequences: the surveillance of political activities re-defines what the private sphere is, and displaces its limits, in a context in which more information is becoming available to the public. Multiple recent developments, exemplified by the role of the right to privacy in movies, exacerbated the tensions between Europe and the United States over the notion of privacy. The future EU data protection laws will create a right to be forgotten, whose political value is still unknown.

The Civil Internet Diplomacy and China’s Countermeasures

The Internet Civil Diplomacy is a major revolution and an emerging trend witnessed in the information age. It poses a significant impact on foreign affairs and official diplomacy due to its unique characteristics—freedom, equality, individuality, real-time, low-cost, and convenience. This chapter reviews the development of Internet-based civil diplomacy and the practice of China’s Internet-based civil diplomacy, which has been greatly developed in recent years in multiple forms—e.g. Web forums, website signatures, event-driven purpose-build foreign affairs sites. Two types of impact of the civil Internet diplomacy—expansion effect and resonance effect—have been examined in the Chinese context through cases, events, and examples. The chapter also identifies challenges and proposes solutions for future development of the civil Internet diplomacy in China.

Facebook as a Tool for Enhancing Alternative/Counter-Public Spheres in Cyprus

The chapter is based on a study focusing on the uses and impact of different forms/media of communication on bicommunal relations in Cyprus. It presents a case study of bicommunal communication through Facebook Groups that took place in Cyprus between 2007-2010. The discussion identifies the ways in which certain Facebook Groups facilitate bicommunal communication in Cyprus and explains why they can be considered part of a counter-public sphere. The analysis suggests that groups whose voices or discourses are excluded from the public domain/sphere can find through the use of tools like Facebook Groups alternative forms of organising and debate, which places them—at least as far as this medium is concerned—on an equal footing with discourses sanctioned by power and hegemonic institutions, such as the press and broadcast media.

Action Potentials

An ideology is defined as a set of ideas that “explains and evaluates social conditions, helps people understand their place in society, and provides a program for social and political action” (Ball & Dagger, 2011, p. 4). As such, these concepts underpin the actions of various groups and organizations, including that of the Anonymous hacker group, which professes no ideology or creed. Rather, the group has styled itself as a kind of anarchic global brain connected by various spaces on the Internet. This work explores four main data streams to extrapolate the group’s ideology: the current socio-political context of hacking and hacktivism; the group’s self-definition (through its professed values); the group’s actions (through the “propaganda of the deed”); and the insights of others about the group This chapter defines the socio-technical context of this Anonymous hacker socio-political movement, which draws ideas from the Hacker Manifesto 2.0, which suggests the advent of a new economic system with the new technological vectors (mediums of communication). This movement is apparently pushing forth the advent of a new information regime in which the abstraction of ideas adds a “surplus” economic value that may be tapped. Styled as fighters against government tyranny, they are pushing hard against an international regime of intellectual property and information control by governments and corporations. This is being published in the spirit that (some) information wants to be free and that there is a value in direct discourse.

Modeling the Relationship between a Human and a Malicious Artificial Intelligence, Natural-Language ’Bot in an Immersive Virtual World

People go to virtual immersive spaces online to socialize through their human-embodied avatars. Through the “passing stranger” phenomenon, many make fast relationships and share intimate information with the idea that they will not deal with the individual again. Others, though, pursue longer-term relationships from the virtual into Real Life (RL). Many do not realize that they are interacting with artificial intelligence ’bots with natural language capabilities. This chapter models some implications of malicious AI natural language ’bots in immersive virtual worlds (as socio-technical spaces). For simplicity, this is referred to as a one-on-one, but that is not to assume that various combinations of malicious ’bots or those that are occasionally human-embodied may not be deployed for the same deceptive purposes.

New Technologies and Democratic Participation on the International Level

This chapter shows that the role of new technologies in global democracy is very important. First, the concept of democracy is analyzed with particular reference to participation and (access to) information. Second, it is explained that democracy should not be limited to the national level because of the major changes of globalization and because of the fact that these changes influence the everyday lives of billions of people. Examples of the United Nations and the European Union are examined, the former as an example of what could be done and how (with regard to individuals’ participation) and the latter as an example of what has already been achieved. Finally, it is explained how and under which conditions new technologies could help build more democratic and more participatory processes on the international level. The concept of access is the central link between information and communication technologies on the one side and international participatory democracy on the other.

Affirmative Action in the United States and Positive Action in the European Union in the Context of Comparative Law

The concept of “formal” equality is an expression of the Aristotelian principle that “treats like cases as like”. However, formal equality may not be sufficient to provide “equality in practice” or “substantive equality.” The implementation of substantive equality often requires the adoption of compensatory policies or measures designed to correct the effects of discrimination suffered by various population groups in the past or present. Such compensatory measures are known as affirmative or positive action. The term “affirmative action” had its beginnings in the 1960s in the USA, as a response to the racial segregation rooted in the country’s history and still prevalent in that decade. In the European Union, the concept of positive action appeared in the 1970s, and was initially associated with promoting gender equality, and subsequently with “substantive” equality of men and women in the workplace. In this chapter the legislative framework and the case law of the Supreme Court is examined in respect to affirmative action in the United States followed by the corresponding European Union legislation and the case law of the ECJ, attempting, finally, to give a comparative review of the law of affirmative action. This study should help us, through the spectrum of Comparative Law, to better understand not only the concept of social rights but also the different values and different perceptions of the law prevailing in different legal cultures.

Transparency in the Open Government Era

The decline in citizen engagement in the public sphere has long been one of the main challenges of modern government. Issues of trust, openness, and transparency are being frequently and intensely discussed as the public manifests lack of confidence in public servants and governmental institutions. The advent and development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is gradually revolutionizing this situation. Open government is an innovative strategy for changing how government works, helping to increase government transparency and accountability at every level. By using network technology to connect the public to government and to one another informed by open data, governments ask for help with solving problems. The end result is more effective institutions and more robust democracy. The chapter has as an objective to discuss on a theoretical level the role of open government mechanisms in introducing a new relation between citizens and policy makers.

The Prohibition of Discrimination on Grounds of Age in EU Law

The objective of this chapter is to analyze the regime of the prohibition of discriminations on grounds of age in EU law in the light of the judgments of Wolf, Petersen, and Kücükdeveci. In particular, this chapter demonstrates that EU law in this matter is moving towards a conceptual uniformity due to the fact that the ECJ recognized that the various principles prohibiting discriminations on grounds of age derived from the EU general principle of equality. Such approach allows the ECJ to extend the scope of Directive 2000/78 and to strengthen the legal force of the principle of non-discrimination on grounds of age. These cases also reveal an orientation to a conceptual autonomy of the principle of non-discrimination on grounds of age vis-à-vis the other basis of discrimination that seems inherent to the specificity of discriminations on grounds of age and to the possibilities of exception to the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of age.

Interpreting “You” and “Me”

Over a billion people are said to use the WWW and Internet, with 1 in 6 humans on earth accessing these technological systems. Many of these users have created their own personal profiles online, and all also have “silent information” about them that may be accessed on a variety of connected databases (including many on the Deep, Hidden, or Invisible Web). People use the WWW and Internet with a semblance of anonymity, but in fact, most interactions online are trackable to Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which allows for the revealing of the individual behind the photo, the video, the information, or other elements. Internet profiles may be coalesced into actual identities, even with inaccuracies, and such information may be kept in perfect electronic memory into perpetuity. This current reality has implications for citizens’ peace-of-mind and degrees of freedom in decision-making. This chapter offers an approach that may serve as a “forcing function” to propose limitations to the sharing of private information in public spaces.