Police face new ethical dilemma in increasingly digital world

      For this ethical dilemma we are dealing with the issue of how our current police departments can manage the protection of our civilians in the digital world. In the article I read for this news event there was a girl that had reported to police that her friend had overdosed on drugs and that she could not be found. The police department in the area later used the girls "comms data" from her cell phone to locate her. The girl was later found and was not in danger of her life.

     Currently, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA, police are allowed to reach out to communications companies to obtain some the data that can help locate a civilian, however this type of protocol should only be used for "very serious situations". This situation can raise very serious ethical dilemmas because where do we draw the line? What is considered "a serious situation?" People can very easily go too far without regulation of this matter and it can also lead to many disputes over privacy rights. Another example given in the article was the case in which a police department had found out that there were illegal pictures of child abuse that were leaked to over 300,000 IP addresses. The police later obtained those IP addresses and tracked them down to innocent civilian homes as they later found out that the IP addresses were to routers and not individual computers. As you ca imagine, those civilians did file many violation of privacy lawsuits, rightfully so.

      Since this dilemma is very current, the police and the government are still trying to formulate a solution to this issue. For the police to simply say that this is the cost of being protected in the new world of technology and digitization and that these are the issues we are just going to have to deal with would be an incorrect and careless way of solving the issue. If we solely observe the situation of the girl overdosing and in need of help to find her friend, it is hard to say that the police handled the situation incorrectly as it is difficult to deem that particular situation anything less than an emergency. However for future reference, there must be a structure that the heads of authority in these dilemmas can use to guide them into making the correct ethical decision. Surely, an "electronic code of ethics" would make the job more difficult for law enforcement. But this is a difficult dilemma to judge and this code of ethics can answer many questions as well as draw boundaries of exactly how far police should or can go given these scenarios. As also mentioned in the article, "there is likely to be widespread support for the idea of a digital code of ethics. Putting it into words might be more of a challenge."

Source: The Guardian Law blog.
URL:http://www.theguardian.com/law/guardian-law-blog/2015/jan/12/police-ethics-digital-internet-technology