Nurturing integrity and whistleblower protections

[veikkoeeva]

This sets up for discussion one cross-cutting feature of this wallet application.

In our roles as private citizens or professionals within companies, championing free speech within the boundaries of loyalty and confidentiality is essential. Yet, the foundation of our democratic societies demands that discussions—especially on challenging and significant topics—be anchored in facts. The discourse must remain open, with no topics off-limits. While everyone is entitled to their opinions, these opinions must be based on facts, not fabricated or twisted to incite hatred, fear, or exclusion.

Our collective responsibility is to foster an inclusive, constructive dialogue, actively dismissing and correcting misinformation. Free speech carries weight and consequences, necessitating a careful balance between openness and accountability.

This principle of integrity extends to how we approach sustainability and transition towards regenerative economies. It's about fostering transparent dialogue across businesses and communities, focusing on risk management, equitable economic rewards, and considering the natural world—a silent stakeholder often overlooked.

Moreover, the spirit of integrity and accountability extends to the public sphere, where environmentalists and human rights activists demonstrate for a sustainable future. Their actions remind us that citizen engagement is not just about participating in demonstrations but about living the values of factual discourse and responsible citizenship every day. Whether it’s in public protests, community discussions, or corporate boardrooms, the call for a factual, respectful exchange of ideas is universal.

A key aspect of nurturing integrity is supporting whistleblowers and ensuring robust data management. For example, when addressing workplace complaints, bullying, or harassment, managing sensitive information requires confidentiality and a comprehensive understanding of data management principles by everyone involved, from frontline staff to senior leadership. This competence is critical to prevent the misuse or inadvertent exposure of personal information, which could lead to retaliation or harm.

In essence, nurturing integrity and protecting whistleblowers are intertwined with robust data management and informed leadership. As we champion factual discourse in public and corporate dialogues, we must also recognize the role of citizen action in shaping a more accountable and transparent society. Our commitment to these principles should reflect in how we handle data, support those who speak out, and engage in the broader environmental and social challenges of our time.

[veikkoeeva]

From today, 82 years ago on February 22, 1943 Sophie Scholl stood before a totalitarian state's guillotine for distributing leaflets that called out the lies and injustices of her time. Her words had exposed the lies of a regime that demanded loyalty and obedience. For daring to speak the truth, she was executed alongside her brother Hans and Christoph Probst. Some of her final words were, "How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause..."

While this is a dramatic case, deeply damaging can happen during coups or when authoritarian laws and legal procedures are introduced to remove whistleblower protections.

In the transition to a regenerative economy and circular economy, wallets can be used to create digital product passports and record observable facts that are then linked to digital product passports. Citizen scientists, activists, and even workers and bureaucrats can do this. This would gradually bring economic externalities as internalities to the system. These passports and facts can be created and shared in federated systems between people using other (connected) protocols such as At Protocol by BlueSky (as a simple example, see cliques in graph theory). This has socio-economic repercussions, requiring whistleblower protections even across several jurisdictions. This is a practical way to see how people could interact with built environment, its materials, flora and fauna.

This requires designs that make it at least selectively impossible to link the person who recorded the facts or to link the facts themselves at critical junctions or facts intended to expose injustice or previously hidden, external effects that could be weaponized against those who bring up explanations regarding them. So, it appears recoding and linking requires consideration about safeguards, risks and ethics. Some designs such as EU Wallet Architectural Reference (ARF) obligate unlinkability, privacy controls, right to be forgotten and many other things within its predetermined domain such as education, travel, payments, government interactions and legal requirements.

EU Wallets and ARF consideration do not reach everywhere. For instance there is also a danger of either creating a digital product passport on humans and/or using digital product passports to track people. By creating a digital passport to represent humans and linking facts to it, individuals can be surveilled and targeted at various interaction points. This can be used to identify dissidents or emergent cases that could challenge centers of power in the network. Timely, such systems could also be used for revenge after a failed coup or uprising attempts, allowing those who take power to hunt down their opponents without legal recourse. People – groups and companies – can harmed also by releasing facts at a carefully chosen time to maximize the harm. There are also potential attacks when objective facts are attached to people without proper contextualization to implicate them. This seem to point toward understand how to capture, or explain, the context at any point in time. A related attack vector is 'dusting' claims, or eviden (cf. dusting).

These risks do not seem to be hypothetical. They are inherent in systems that link facts (or claims or endorsements) and identities without protection. Integrity demands designs that safeguard individuals, even when power shifts. If these safeguards are not built in, the systems intended to protect truth will be used to silence it. There likely needs to be consideration safeguard for other species than humans. There likely needs to be considerations to attestation systems and data storage beyond what ARF mandates or eIDAS in general places to qualified digital signature providers or eArchiving requires for data storage.

For larger research on humans, other species or economic risks, a noteworthy point besides linkability of the data structures will be the use of artificial intelligence. Individuals likely use the wallet with artificial intelligence to explain things to them as part of sense-making. The whistleblowers collect digital records, their connections, combine them and share them (to recognize otherwise hidden patterns). At least when used as decision-support systems or perhaps in automated agents, these actions need to be explainable within the context of the system technically and otherwise. The world is also built in small steps, so it makes sense to think that small things can be solved locally.

What are the ethics and safety issues? Has the discussion and academic research already split (see also comments in the linked post) so that safety is for the privileged and ethics rationalizes damage done by the system as a whole or by its individual components separately?