As Tom indicated, this is a time of incredible change and opportunity. It is clear to everyone that new communications technologies are fundamentally changing the way we participate in the social, economic and political process. It is hard to pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about how the Internet is changing the way we work, play and learn. But at this point, we do not actually know much about what those changes are, or more importantly, what they will be in the future. We do know that a phenomenal number of people around the world are participating in electronic communications networks. As you know, the largest network, the internet, is estimated to encompass 50 million users in over 130 countries. Still, it is important to look at the other side of the coin, the opposite side of the statistic. If there are 50 million people world-wide using this new form of technology, that means most of us are not. In fact, it is estimated that 75% of the world's population has never even used a telephone.

Even though its use is still limited to certain sectors of society, the idea of a global electronic communications network has entered into our collective consciousness. We have even created new words to describe it. People do not search through online databases, they surf the net. When they participate in a discussion, they do not disagree with each other they flame each other. We call it "Cyberspace" and "Cyberia" as if it is a place. I think we do that because in many ways it is a place. The defining characteristics of this new technology is that it is interactive. People do not just exchange computer files over some cables; they argue, they debate, they shop, they gossip.

In fact, the Internet is not just one place but it is many places. It's a library. It's a school. It's a town hall - a place where we gather as a community to debate the pressing social and political issues of the day. It's a community centre - it is the place we play, read serial novels and help each other. It's our kitchen - it is a place where we can chit chat, exchange pleasantries, get advice and generally connect with our circle of friends. And as we are becoming increasingly aware, it's a back alley. It is a place where terrorists can teach each other how to build nuclear bombs, and where people can get pornography from all over the world, whether or not it violates Canadian criminal laws regarding obscenity.

In other words, it is a very human place, where people do all the things they do in the real world. And they can do them faster and more easily on-line. That has two implications for human rights. The first is that new technologies give the people who use them an advantage over the people who do not. And that advantage has educational, economic, political and social consequences. In other words, their ability to participate in this technology dramatically impacts their quality of life and their ability to share in global resources. The second implication is that the technology itself is changing the way we interact, as people, as communities and as nation-states. That means the landscape on which human rights battles are fought is changing as well.

We have already seen the phenomenal impact open communications can have on human rights in the international arena. The fact that the Chinese government couldn't stop the flow of information both into and out of China during Tienamen Square or that the former Soviet Union was unable to keep its citizens from accessing Western news electronically impacted both the internal and external politics of those countries. Repressive regimes now face a unique problem. As information becomes the stock in trade of the new global political economy, they are forced to rely upon a communication infrastructure which they can not control.

The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Any attempt to censor or control the flow of information is interpreted as damage and the Net routes around it. The Net is also a quintessentially egalitarian place; so long as one person is committed to making information available, any one on the Net can get access to it. In order to ensure individual citizens do not have access to certain information on the Net, the regime seeking to censor the information can only do so by shutting down its entire communications infrastructure; but it is dependant upon that infrastructure if it wants to participate in the global information economy.

This dependence poses opportunities and dangers for international human rights. The greatest opportunity is to promote the development of a truly global community, where people from different cultures and background learn from each other and share their experiences and knowledge. But the failure to provide fair, universal access to that exchange of knowledge will have huge ramifications on the international stage. Right now, the Net is concentrated in North America, Europe and Australia and there is almost no penetration into Africa and little into Asia. Late entry into this new world of electronic communications is not necessarily a disadvantage as countries which have not already invested in out-of-date infrastructure can go immediately to fibre optics, satellite and infra-red networks fairly cheap and easily. However, no entry means the disenfranchisement and marginalization of the countries which can least afford the consequences of that marginalization.

That danger of marginalization is also very real in the domestic arena. The technology can be seductive for governments and grass roots organizations seeking to create a political consensus with every shrinking fund. We believe that providing people with access points to the information highway will ensure that everyone has access to education, health information and the political process itself. But the recent experience of the Burbank Community Network gives us reason to look at those assumptions more closely. The city of Burbank, California wanted to use new communications networks to broaden participation in the political process. They created the Burbank Community Network, and put workstations in public shopping centres, libraries and community centres. After 1 year, they concluded that the Network did not increase access to the political process; it just provided people who were already politically motivated with another method of having political input.

In order to make this new technology truly democratic, we must identify and respond to the barriers that people face when it comes to becoming technologically empowered. I believe these barriers include things like gender, language, culture and poverty. Our best guess is that approximately 70 to 75% of the people who use the Net are male. Add to that statistic the recent research indicating that there are significant gender inequities in the teaching of science and technology in Canadian schools, and the migration to the information highway puts girls and women at risk of being left out of the emerging information marketplace. The dominance of English as the language of technology creates unique problems in the Canadian context; globally, there is already a movement afoot which views the technology as a tool of English imperialism. Moreover, the erosion of language diversity may lead to the erosion of cultural diversity as well. And the impact of poverty becomes even more marked as more schools and universities turn to the information highway as a tool for learning, and more businesses cut back on unskilled workers in favour of well-paid, knowledge-driven employees and freelancers.

If communications technology is to deliver on its promise as an empowering, democratic force, then governments, educators and the private sector must begin to address the need to make this new electronic community open and accessible to everyone. Our ability to ensure that meaningful access, equity and fairness are placed on the agenda is of the utmost importance.

Up to now, we have focused on a narrower vision of human rights in Cyberspace. Most of the early legislation has revolved around the impact of new technologies on individual privacy. Clearly, this is an important area and one which must be addressed with creativity and commitment. But we have been limited in many ways by the political and legal structures which have served us well in the past.

Perhaps part of the problem is the way we have defined privacy. Traditionally, the law has seen the right to privacy as the right of the individual to be left alone. But privacy is more than this. Privacy is what defines the borders of our personal lives. It is the grey line between what we do in our space and how we interact with the rest of society. Privacy is not only necessary to protect our individuality - it also summarizes many of the social assumptions which lets us co-operate as a community. As that community begins to express itself electronically, we have to establish ground rules to protect the relationship we form over the Net, whether those relationships are commercial, professional or personal in nature.

Current privacy legislation focuses on a much narrower issue. It reflects the concern that grew over the 1960's and 70's that large institutions (such as governments and banks) can use technology to collect and exchange vast amounts of information about each of us. That makes sense if you think about the type of computing which was prevalent at the time. Powerful computers were huge and expensive, and only large institutions had the resources to buy one, let alone support one. People used individual terminals to work with the computer, but all the processing, all the brain work occurred at one location. Computing was, therefore, a top down activity. If it had shape, it would have been a pyramid with the computer at the top, controlling the use of information, and the people working with or providing the information at the bottom.

Accordingly, in 1980, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published its Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Information. The guidelines seek to protect individuals who provide personal information to large organizations which then store that information electronically. Regulation is an obvious tool to protect the confidentiality of such personal data because there's such an inequality of bargaining power between the information collector and the information provider. The OECD guidelines are based on the need to ensure that the organizations which use personal information do so in an open manner which respects the individual's need for confidentiality.

However, even in that context, government policies have created an uneven patchwork of rules to protect the confidentiality of personal information stored in government and corporate databases. In Canada, the federal Privacy Act is based on the OECD Guidelines. The Act also created the Office of the Privacy Commissioner which is responsible for monitoring the ways in which the federal government collects, uses and discloses personal information about its employees and clients. Such personal information includes an individual's name, address, age, race, ethnicity, financial status, employment history, criminal records, medical history and personal views. But the Act is limited in many ways, most notably by the fact it only applies to data collected by the federal government. Although Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia have each passed similar legislation, Quebec is the first province to extend regulations governing the use and exchange of personal information to the private sector, by legislation that came into force in January of 1994. Outside of Quebec, businesses may or may not adhere to a variety of voluntary codes concerning the use of personal information.

The Canadian Standards Association undertook the task of developing a national standard which expands on the OECD Guidelines. The CSA Code has added two provisions. The first requires that the person giving personal information must consent to its collection. The second establishes the right to challenge the collector's compliance with all of the guidelines, not just the requirement that the data be accurate.

Clearly, we need to regulate the use of personal information and initiatives such as the 1994 privacy legislation in Quebec and the Canadian Standards Association's voluntary Privacy Code are to be applauded. Moreover, this type of regulation is politically feasible for two reasons: first because its easy to locate the organizations you want to regulate; and second, because governments and companies are comfortable with regulation. They are used to being one of two players who sit down and iron out a consensus which accommodates both their interests. It is also politically feasible to move forward on this front because corporations which abide by voluntary guidelines can find themselves at a disadvantage in the marketplace. The Canadian Telemarketer's Association, for example, recently called for government legislation imposing guidelines on Canadian industry for exactly that reason.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that our understanding of technology and privacy has changed since 1982, and regulation may not be able to response to new issues emerging on the information highway. One reason is the nature of regulation itself. A regulatory body is designed to accommodate vested corporate and institutional interests and protect status quo. There is nothing conspiratorial about this; a regulator can only regulate by creating a working relationship with the corporations being regulated. It is the nature of institutional life that a regulatory body which invests time and energy in creating an appropriate balance between their mandate and corporate realities then has a vested interest in maintaining that status quo.

But new communications technologies are fundamentally re-writing the status quo. The information highway of today isn't a pyramid, it is a complex web which is accessible to individuals as it is to large corporate and government players. Economies of scale have been stripped away and everybody is equally able to play the role of publisher, commentator and critic. In this environment, regulation which may be appropriate to the relationship between a government and its citizens or a corporation and its customers may not be appropriate to the relationship between those persons who are participating in personal communications or public debate and discussion on the Net. In these areas, regulation goes beyond the protection of confidentiality of personal information, and becomes surveillance and an attack on free speech.

The fact of the information highway is that the marketplace, the town hall and the back alley are all merging into our kitchens. The social rules we have about appropriate behaviour differ in each of these environments, and yet they all reside in the same narrow bandwidth of cable linking my computer to Ernst Zundel's and Salmon Rushdie's computers. This means that in Cyberspace, the right to privacy is inextricably linked to questions of free speech and the right to be free of unwanted electronic surveillance or intrusion.

Governments will not be able to respond to the unique needs of privacy on the Net unless they adopt an understanding of the nature of privacy which is broader than mere confidentiality of personal data. I would suggest that government must develop a national privacy policy which recognizes the following principles:

• The right to privacy includes the right to be free from unnecessary surveillance
• The right to privacy includes the right to control the disclosure and use of Personal information
• The right to privacy includes the right to be free from unnecessary or unwanted intrusion or solicitation
• The right to privacy is based on the recognition of the fundamental value of human dignity and autonomy

Another difficulty in protecting human rights in Cyberspace is the global nature of the Net. Human rights, as we have conceptualized them, reflect our cultural understanding of the relationship between the individual and the community. One of the reason that the OECD guidelines have been successful is the fact that the member states of the OECD, and other Western countries which have adopted similar guidelines, share assumptions about the value of the individual and a free market economy. Promoting the protection of privacy and free speech becomes more difficult when there is no underlying agreement or consensus about basic social and political values. As the Net becomes a truly global phenomenon, the potentiality for commonality decreases. The question becomes: where these values conflict, whose rules should apply?

The recent conviction of Robert and Carleen Thomas on obscenity charges is a case in point. The Thomases operated a computer bulletin board in Milpitas, California where people could post messages and pictures dealing with sexually explicit material. Under the leading USSC decision on obscenity, Miller v. California, the question of whether material is obscene must be judged according to community standards. The idea behind the Miller decision was to ensure that the liberal standards in New York or California would not be imposed on communities in more conservative states. By all accounts, the material on the Thomases bulletin board was not obscene according to California law.

The Thomases troubles did not start in California however. A Tennessee postal inspector, working closely with an assistant US Attorney in Memphis, dialled into the Thomases bulletin board and, from his computer in Tennessee, downloaded a number of sexually oriented images from the Thomases computer in California. At the Thomases trial, these images were judged to be obscene according to community standards not in California, where the Thomases resided, but in Tennessee, where the images were downloaded. The Thomases were convicted in Tennessee on 11 obscenity charges each carrying a maximum sentence of 5 years and a $250,000 fine.

Now, the Thomases never left the state of California, and have no control over who downloaded what from their computer in California or where the bits went over the Net; and yet they face serious repercussions from actions which were legal in their state residence. The case raises difficult questions about jurisdiction, but it also challenges our understanding of the nature of community.

In the virtual world of the Internet, people congregate according to their interests, rather than the accidents of geography. To date, the Net has relied upon a form of zoning to avoid unwanted clashes of community values. That postal worker in Tennessee, the argument goes, is not forced to see pornographic images unless he chooses to visit a site like the Thomases bulletin board. There is a danger in the Thomases decision that, rather than protecting more conservative communities from the intrusion of idea which are unacceptable to them, less conservative communities will be held to the values of their more restrictive neighbours. That standard becomes even more dangerous in a global community with widely divergent rules about sexuality, morality and political expression.

The same kind of conflict can be seen in the recent experience of Compuserve and Deutsche Telekom AG. Both companies were investigated by the German government in 1995 for inciting racial hatred, contrary to German criminal law. because their subscribers could access Ernst Zundel's home page over the Internet. Compuserve responded on December 22, 1995 by agreeing to remove over 200 newsgroups from its menus, including various discussions and support groups for gay men and lesbian women.

Net users were deeply concerned by Compuserve's decision and saw is as a serious attack on free speech, but the action served to be a gesture at best. German surfers could still access the same sites over the Net through different paths. For example, there is an award winning Canadian WWW site at the University of Toronto which "Canadianizes" information. Basically, the site can mirror any page from anywhere on the Web after adding various Canadian cultural content like ending sentences with Eh? A person logging onto Compuserve in Germany could visit this site and have it mirror a site which was no longer available on Compuserve menu. The German government would only know that the user visited the U of T.

Apart from the technical difficulties of controlling access to information on the Net, there is also a cultural difficulty. The Net is a place where people have the tools they need to ensure information remains accessible to all. Within hours of Compuserve's decision, a number of users had created mirrors of Ernst Zundel's site - not because they agreed with the contents of the site but because they were committed to the value of free speech. It is this dame commitment which allows corporate whistle blowers and political dissidents to communicate with people outside political and economic borders.

On February 13, 1996, Compuserve reversed its decision and reinstated all but 5 of the deleted newsgroups; those 5 contain explicit child pornography and are still under investigation by Compuserve's lawyers. At the same time they announced they were adding an additional service to their subscribers called Cyber Patrol. Cyber Patrol was developed by Microsystems Software Inc. and allows people to filter what can come to their computers over the Net. For $70/year, Microsystems will provide a continuous content review service which rates Internet sites according to set criteria. People can use the software to filter out information which falls into categories which they do not want to see.

This protects users from the intrusion of information which is offensive to them, and that secures their privacy. At the same time, it allows users to participate in discussions which may be offensive to their more conservative neighbours, and that secures their freedom of speech. It also makes it more likely that users who post criminal statements, such as those housed on Ernst Zundel's homepage, will be held to account by the laws of the place where they, and their ISP, reside.

Tools such as Cyber Patrol and encryption software put control over access to information in the hands of the person best able to judge whether it is private or public; the person using the information. The final report of the first round of the Canadian Information Highway Advisory Council implicitly supported this position when it advised the Canadian government to promote the creation of a public key infrastructure. These public key infrastructure's are essential to the broadly based use of encryption software.

However, the experience of Phil Zimmerman, creator of the software package called PGP or Pretty Good Privacy is illustrative of the challenges the human rights movement faces in promoting this independence for users. PGP was the first widely used encryption programme. Zimmerman posted it to an Internet newsgroup in June 1991 precisely so people all over the world would have the ability to control the privacy of their e-mail messages. And he has been subjected to all sorts of legal action by the United States government since. The government argued that PGP fell under regulations which control the sale of weapons and other technologies whose export may compromise national security. This regulation makes it illegal to export cryptographic software without special munitions export licence. Zimmerman was brought before a federal Grand Jury and the investigation continued until January 11, 1996 when the US Attorney suddenly, and without explanation, dropped the case.

The contrast between the American and the Canadian governments approaches to encryption proves an important point. The technical inability of governments to control the flow of information over the Net does not mean they no longer have tools to administer their own laws within their borders. However, it is important to recognize that the methods they use within their jurisdictions will have an impact on the limits of human rights in the new information age. It is one of those enjoyable ironies that the same week the American legislature passed its notorious Communications Decency Act, making it a criminal offence to use a telecommunications device to "knowingly make, create or solicit...any comment, request, proposal, image, or other communications which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent", the Chinese government announced that it is requiring every person with an account on an Internet service provider to come in and sign a promise that they won't use the Internet for communications which harm the state. But the political policies behind these actions should give us pause; it is time that we, as an international and diverse community, begin to address the need to develop rules and regulations which will promote a free and healthy exchange of information over a universally accepted global network. Our ability or inability to do so will be one of the defining characteristics of the digital age.