Towards a clean slate: Attempting to preserve civil liberty in the post-Snowden age

Abstract

Wide adoption of mobile computing, smartphones, social networks and big data techniques have brought undoubtable advantages to society as such, as well as to its individuals. The downside of this diffusion of technology throughout society has already been well discussed. Single authors also pointed out the threats not only to the single individual, but to democratic society as a whole. However, suggestions or even practical approaches of how to mitigate these threats not only at the individual level (Folks, keep your virus scanner up to date all the time!), but for society itself, are rarely found up to this day. There is no simple solution to this problem, of course. Particularly not a small one that can be carried out by a single peer group. Rather, we want to motivate that there are different approaches to the shared common goal of preserving civil liberty for many individual groups of society. In this article, we focus on a strategy for computer scientists on how to perform their part in the big picture, and try to motivate this by calling up on their professional ethics.