Читать книгу The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade - Страница 53

The top layer reflects the fact that people are an integral component of cyberspace. Indeed, people (rather than technology) explain the dynamic, ever-changing nature of cyberspace as users employ its various capabilities in ways that depart from, and even confound, the expectations of component, software, and system designers.

There are several important implications attendant to this layer of the model under discussion. First, while constitutions, laws, and policies typically allocate rights to people based on their citizenship or physical location, cyberspace allocates access and privileges based on the identities formed and authenticated in cyberspace. The old joke of one dog saying to another that “on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog” remains truer than not across broad swaths of the domain. Although there is often a reconciliation of a person's status between the physical and virtual worlds, cyberspace rules prevail in the determination of privilege in accessing resources in and through cyberspace. This reality makes the application of laws defined in the physical world to its cyberdoppelgänger challenging, especially when identities in cyberspace are spoofed or are indeterminate as a result of the users' employment of applications designed to cloak their identity so that their actions can be taken without attribution (sometimes referred to as “anonymity” features). This is not to say that the distinctions defined in the physical world do not matter, or that they do not have jurisdiction in cyberspace, but merely that it is often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to identify users or assign attribution within the current capabilities of cyberspace. This difficulty has significant implications for any desire to attribute actions in cyberspace so that identification of who took a certain action can be achieved and serve as a basis for meting out the appropriate rewards or consequences attendant to the action.