Media Law: Having our cake and eating it too

I am approaching the final blog assignments of my Digital Media Literacy course, and for the first time, challenged in finding my words. I probably need more time to process this week’s learning materials; to look at the world with this new information before I can really develop my views. And I will, but here are some of my thoughts about media law and what we have learned this week.

Media law, plus those who create and use it, has tough questions to answer. How do we use the access technology gives us to make the world a better or safer place? Who gets to decide if our means justify our ends? Who should be protected? Governments? Populations? Individuals? Women? Men? Computer literate? Computer illiterate? Corporations? And at whose expense? Who gets to balance the scales when these worlds collide? And how far can they go? Where do we draw the line as consumers?

I appreciated when Cory Doctorow said, “We don’t know how to make a back door that only good guys can go through.” There’s definitely a need for backdoors, but backdoors create problems. It’s almost too big to solve, like the whole chicken and egg conundrum.

My husband recalls news that the FBI issued a subpoena to Google for a list of all of the people in a certain area at the time of a murder. They found the murderer because of the information provided by Google, but they violated a lot of innocent people’s privacy to obtain that information.

I searched for this story, but could not confirm it. But this is a perfect example of how things get fuzzy very quickly with media law. Was this right or wrong and how far can the authorities peer into our lives through technology? I also wonder, why it was okay to call on Google to solve this particular crime. Certainly, the FBI can’t run to Google to solve all of their murder cases. So, why this one?

Here’s another example: Amazon handed over Echo data to the FBI in a murder case. The company challenged the subpoena at first but later released it with the defendant’s permission.

This may be an odd but fitting story. My husband and I disagree about donating blood. I think people should donate blood to banks whenever they can, but my husband thinks that blood banks use at least some of the blood irresponsibly – perhaps for research or to feed vampires. Blood donation is ethically wrong in our belief system, but both of us would accept blood from the hospital to save ourselves or our children.

People might get a little uncomfortable with the amount of access agencies have to their lives through media, but they’d probably use it to solve their own problems in a heartbeat.

All that said, I still have to figure out what all this means. For now, this knowledge is not changing how I use technology, but I certainly have a lot to think about.