The purpose of this research is to examine issue fronts relevant to the topic of digital civil rights. The plan of the research will be to set forth a working definition of the concept and then to discuss the principal concerns that have emerged in the discourse of access to and governance of Internet technology and policies in recent years.
As the term implies, digital civil rights in its most general formulation refers to the distribution of social justice, or civil rights, within the context of information management. This emerging field of discourse takes as its point of departure the protection of individual rights and protections vis-a-vis government and corporate institutions. On one hand, digital-civil-rights advocates aim to protect and encourage widespread access to information digitized as electronic data, whether graphical, audio, or text-based. On the other hand, digital civil rights involves advocacy of protection of individual privacy rights from unwarranted intrusion and/or exploitation on the part of corporate, government, or individual sources. These two broad mandates entail a host of intellectual-property and "cyber-crime" issues --from music and movie piracy to the security of individual financial data for online comercial transactions, as well as the regulation of online technology with regard to marketing and other business practices.
The issue of equal access to Internet technology for all demographic groups in the US has been discussed in the context of equal opportunity to exploit social goods associated with the dominance of computer-driven telecommunications. As Federal Communications Commission Chairman William E. Kennard told a meeting of the President's Committee on Employment of Persons with Disabilities in 1999: "No frontier will be more important than telecommunications and disability rights; it is the new frontier in the civil rights struggle" (Kennard). That claim goes to the issue of access, s...