[Research Talk] Practicing Responsible Computing: A Near History | Megan Finn (danah boyd)

Computing researchers and professionals are currently agitating to change their industry’s response to issues ranging from privacy to racism to gender discrimination to climate change. The current push towards responsible computing feels newly vital, but it has important historical antecedents. Moments in the history of computing ethics hold important lessons about how the work of defining, practicing, and enforcing responsible computing influences the outcomes of those efforts. In this short article, we examine three efforts to organize and practice responsible computing. First, we examine the early history of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit that began in 1981 with the goal of organizing computer professionals to stop nuclear war. CPSR’s practices, techniques and arguments serve as an example of computing professionals arguing for the limits of computing. We also examine the more recent efforts of a group of DHS-funded computer scientists, lawyers, and others to produce the Menlo Report, a set of guidelines for ethical computer networking and computer security research. Analyzing the history of the Menlo Report illustrates the ways that work factors, including relative expertise, funding, and logistics, shape choices about ethical frameworks and outcomes. Last, we examine the recent rise of requirements for ethics statements for computer security and network measurement research conferences. Contrasting these three efforts to define computer ethics reveals what kinds of responsibility each of these efforts articulates, as well as what kinds of responsibility were sidelined or elided. Through this analysis, we hope to underscore how qualitative and historically-informed research about computing can inform today’s debates and ethical interventions.

Link here for the paper:
From Closed World Discourse to Digital Utopianism: The Changing Face of
Responsible Computing at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
(1981-1992)

Keywords: technology activism; pre-Internet history; values in computing; computers and war; responsible computing; civil liberties.

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