cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/213918
I’m increasingly encountering situations where people are forced to go through various kinds of technical hoops in order to exercise their legal rights.
Five examples:
① You have a right to reserve streetside public parking in front of your house (e.g. for a week-long construction project). Historically you can go to city hall or the like, give your schedule, and pay a fee. But then they decided to put the reservation system exclusively online. Cash payers are excluded. Offline people are excluded. People who are online but do not want to share their email address with an office that uses Microsoft for their email are also excluded.
② You have a right to unemployment benefits. But the unemployment office goes online and forces you to solve a Google reCAPTCHA. Google’s reCAPTCHA often refuses to serve the puzzles to Tor users. People who are on clearnet may be unable to solve the CAPTCHA. Some people /can/ solve it but object to feeding a system that helps Google profit because they boycott Google.
③ You have a right to vote. But the voter registration process exposes your sensitive information to the tech giant Cloudflare and Amazon. Even if you register on paper, the data entry workers will expose your data to Cloudflare and Amazon anyway.
④ You have a right to energy access. But the energy company refuses cash payments so you are forced to open a bank account. All banks force you into a situation that goes against your beliefs. E.g. forcing you to obtain from Google a closed-source app to run on a smartphone (which you may not even have), or the bank’s website is Cloudflared and you will not share your sensitive financial info with CF. And the banks either have no analog/offline means of service, or the offline services are costly.
⑤ A public school excludes students who are unwilling to use Facebook, Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft products & services. Anyone can attend but those who refuse to feed the corporate surveillance capitalists are put at a great disadvantage perhaps to the extent that they cannot pass their classes.
Not all those examples are real. E.g. in the real life scenario of case ② I think there is an offline option (but not sure during a pandemic). So my question is hypothetical— assume there is no pathway to service except for satisfying the barriers to entry.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 21:
“2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”
Some nuances can be extracted from the examples:
A) You are incapable of exercising your right yourself. E.g. blind and the CAPTCHA requires vision, or you are not tech literate enough to follow the tech process. But you can hire someone to do the work for you.
B) You are capable of exercising your rights but unwilling to accept the conditions. Hiring someone may or may not be possible depending on whether your personal conditions can be accommodated.
So the big question is, for groups A and B: are rights being violated?
Group B is the more interesting one. A common attitude is: those people have “preferences” and their rights are not violated when their preference is not respected. I find that quite harsh. When a right becomes conditional by the institutions who are supposed to support the right, IMO the conditions (which are not written in law) are inherently excluding people. If a right is going to be made conditional, isn’t there some kind of legal principle that the conditions be codified into law and not some arbitrary condition that a systems administrator decided was a good idea?
#rightToBeOffline #rightToBeAnalog
This in a sense pertains to the privacy vs. security debate. When both are principles that are consecrated (to different extents) by the law, the legislator and judge have to put some effort into conciliating the two. This is done respectively through exceptions and criteria of appreciation.
Regarding your question: from a positivist standpoint, rights are constructions by the State granted to particulars. They can be taken and given in a whim by virtue of a legal text or jurisprudence. If one finds that a certain (not prescribed) conditioning is unfairly hindering their enjoyment of a right, then the matter should be settled in court.
some kind of legal principle that the conditions be codified into law and not some arbitrary condition that a systems administrator decided was a good idea?
In administrative law, the principle of legality provides that public administration must only act according to the law. In other words, the submission of the administration to the law serves as a garantee to citizens from arbitrary, administrative action. Whenever the administrator violates a general principle of law (bonus points if the constitution consecrates it), legal action via the court is almost guaranteed to overturn the act.
In the (hypothetical) case of limiting certain public services to online platforms, one can make the case for a violation to the right to access public services without undue empediment. However, if the public interest calls for limitations, then said right will accordingly be conditioned.
You Sir, are a paragon of clarity, balance and accuracy. My respect.
I appreciate the detailed feedback, which I think probably answers my question as well as possible from a utilitarian standpoint to a usable extent.
I primarily needed to verify that when speaking at rallies I would not be falsely informing people or pushing an indefensible position. If a public service is made exclusive even per a loose interpretation whereby objectionable conditions stand as a barrier, it seems fair enough to at least claim that rights are being violated all the way to the courthouse, and inside the courthouse, until a judge determines otherwise. You gave me the confidence I was after.
Do you mean equitable access? Doesn’t equal access just means the public service doesn’t discriminate? If they create a condition that everyone has to meet instead of just a subset then that’s still equal access.
But ultimately the spirit of your argument is that I don’t think it’s practical for organizations with limited resources to accommodate everyone, so they strive to handle the majority.
In a lot of cases, they can accommodate everyone but simply neglect to.
E.g. the public parking service was originally offline, thus proving they had the resources to accommodate offline people. They recently decided to take that away and exclusively serve online people. If they somehow lost resources and have to choose one or the other, choosing offline option accommodates more people because online people can also function offline (but not vice-versa). I’m also not sure how resources fall short, because you don’t get to reserve parking for free. You pay a fee to reserve parking, so the people are bringing the resources to cover their own request.
The online option is more exclusive than the offline option. Lines are being drawn in ways that create inequality. If they need to save money, they can save money in ways that have equal impact. E.g. instead of a public school excluding some people from education entirely, they can shorten or eliminate gym classes so equality is maintained amid resource shortages.
I think it’s a different argument that your public services are poorly run and are making bad decisions. In this case the recourse in a democratic society is to speak up or vote to change the local government.
Obviously incompetence and corruption always exist so YMMV.
The thesis of the thread is essentially to fight against digital exclusion. Part of that fight is to get a big spotlight on the infringement of existing rights.
It’s very rare that I find an online public service that’s well run. I demand the same level of privacy protection that I had in the offline procedures. This implies the ability to use Tor in the very least among other things like not having to expose email to Microsoft. Most normies are not even technically competent enough to know what Tor is. The normies on my side of this fight are excluded for other reasons, like tech illiteracy. Without the tech illiterates on my side I would be isolated and trivially easy to marginalize.
The only practical solution is having an offline option for every public service. It’s impossible to train public administrations to be competent enough to process Tor traffic, to run in-house mail servers & install PGP so sensitive info is not exposed to surveillance capitalists, and then to also train all tech illiterate citizens to be able to use these systems. It’s impossible. Even if it were possible, how do you serve cash payers without bank accounts? Offline procedures are the only way to include everyone under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 21.
I guess where I live there’s always offline alternatives, even the parking meters still accept coins even though they also take credit cards.
In any case it’s not like countries actually provide all of the other articles. For the US, vacation and healthcare aren’t provided, so it’s not surprising the other articles are not followed either. It’s not really a law.
I guess where I live there’s always offline alternatives, even the parking meters still accept coins even though they also take credit cards.
Example ① concerns being able to block off parking for one’s self. E.g. imagine a row of street parking with meters, and you have a project to renovate your house. A crane needs to use that space. It’s not a matter of feeding meters. You go to city hall and pay (e.g.€100/day) to reserve a section of parking in advance with guaranteed access. City workers come and cover the meters, they post a temporary “no parking” sign, etc. Now today if you go to city hall they just point to a QR code on a wall. That’s it. No more over the counter service. If you can’t work with that you’re stuffed… you don’t get to reserve parking for a crane and your renovation is effectively blocked by an asshole in public administration who assumes not only that everyone is online, but that everyone’s browser is Chromium &, that everyone is okay with sharing their home address with Microsoft (or whatever info traverses Outlook), and whatever other tech limitations the website has.
I think my region also has the problem you refer to (of parking meters not taking cash). That’s similar but less of an injustice. Renovating a house is more important than convenient parking for a personal car.
In any case it’s not like countries actually provide all of the other articles. For the US, vacation and healthcare aren’t provided, so it’s not surprising the other articles are not followed either. It’s not really a law.
Healthcare comes in many forms. I would say the US does not guarantee or provide preventative healthcare, but if you show up to ER at any hospital in the US with a gunshot wound (for example), it’s illegal for the hospital to refuse treatment. They cannot make insurance a condition of emergency care. Although if someone were to argue emergency care alone does not adequately satisfy Article 25’s entitlement to “medical care”, I would not object. I would hope they could use art.25 to force preventative healthcare to some extent.
I’m not sure why you mention vacation. Article 23 covers employment rights, which includes unemployment protection but not vacations AFAICT.
I guess this is regional since the city hall here has written forms for this stuff, which is actually kind of annoying to me as it’s sometimes the only option.
Article 24 specifically mentions paid holidays and Articles 25.2 can only really be implemented via some type of parental leave.
Ah, I missed art.24. I suspect in the US vacations would be regulated on a per-state basis. The right to vacations is easily defensible, though I wonder about the “with pay” clause. Some jobs pay high enough wages that income would not in itself be an obstacle to vacations, but then those often tend to be the kinds of jobs that include paid vacations anyway. People getting a wage that is less than living are probably getting shafted on that one in some parts of the US particularly if they are in the gig economy with the chickenizing going on (a throwback from the poultry industry where people are falsely independent to circumvent employment rights).