Gary Chapman, Internet Ethicist, Dies at 58

Gary Chapman, Internet Ethicist, Dies at 58
By KATIE HAFNER
December 17, 2010

Gary Chapman, an educator, writer and widely recognized expert on the impact of high technology on society and public policy, died Tuesday while on a kayaking trip in Guatemala. He was 58.

The cause was a heart attack, his family said...

For seven years Mr. Chapman was the executive director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit group concerned with the impact of technology on society. Under his guidance, it grew into an influential organization with international reach.

In the 1980s, the group cast a particularly skeptical eye on the application of computers to decision-making in military systems and took a public stand against the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars.

Mr. Chapman was on the faculty of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He also founded and directed the school’s 21st Century Project, which studies the social implications of information technology and telecommunications.

Although not a computer scientist himself, and neither a champion nor a foe of technology per se, Mr. Chapman gave voice to many leaders in the field who struggled with the ethical implications of new technology.

“He helped many distinguished computer scientists articulate their concerns,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington and a longtime colleague of Mr. Chapman’s. “He promoted an important dialogue between leaders in computer science and the broader public. It’s part of a very important tradition, and he played a key role.”

Closer to home, Mr. Chapman also worked to bridge the so-called digital divide, the gulf between those with access to technology and those without. In 1995, his 21st Century Project helped bring computers and the Internet to low-income areas of Austin.

“He made many people stop and ask hard questions about technology,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “Not just ‘Is it cool?’ but ‘Does it make our lives better, or more just? And does it make our world more secure?’ ”

Gary Brent Chapman was born on Aug. 8, 1952, in Los Angeles. In the mid-1970s he was a medic with the Army Special Forces.

After his military service Mr. Chapman attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, graduating in 1979 with a degree in political science. He was a Ph.D. student at Stanford University’s political science program in 1984, when he left to take the job at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

“When word went around in the community of peace activists that we had hired a former Green Beret, eyebrows were raised everywhere,” said Severo Ornstein, a computer scientist and a founder of the organization. But through Mr. Chapman’s careful and original thinking on a variety of issues, Mr. Ornstein said, “the raised eyebrows were quickly defused.”

With David Bellin, Mr. Chapman edited “Computers in Battle: Will They Work?” (Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

As a senior lecturer at the University of Texas, Mr. Chapman taught graduate courses in technology policy. “Over the years, Gary mentored dozens of students, who went on to work in key policy areas,” said Sherri Greenberg, a fellow faculty member.

Mr. Chapman’s survivors include his wife, Carol Flake Chapman; his father, Arthur S. Chapman, and stepmother, Pierrette Chapman, of Solvang, Calif.; and a half-brother, Duane Chapman, of Bakersfield, Calif.

Although Mr. Chapman was known to colleagues as soft-spoken, he could be passionate when arguing a point. Eric Roberts, a computer science professor at Stanford, recalled that at a C.P.S.R. board meeting on the Stanford campus in 1988, Mr. Chapman banged his fist on the table to make his case. “Just at that moment we had an earthquake...”

If big Internet companies like AT&T and Verizon remain unregulated, will they control access to information?

They Say We Know Nothing About the Internet
By DAVID WASHBURN
Jan 13, 2009

The internet is the most complex and far-reaching system ever developed by man -- without it, modern society would essentially grind to a halt. Yet it is about as regulated as a pick-up basketball game...

That so much about the internet is unknowable doesn't necessarily mean that it is in trouble. But it does mean that if it were in trouble, we might not know about it until it was too late.

This is what really bothers Kimberly Claffy and Dmitri Krioukov, two internet researchers at the University of California, San Diego's Supercomputer Center. ...They say, as long as there is such scant oversight, the information highway is likely to get more expensive, less accessible and more vulnerable to viruses and cyber crime in general.

In their wildest dreams, the academics and U.S. Defense Department scientists who designed ARAPNET in the late 1960s did not envision YouTube, MySpace or iTunes. Yet their design remains the basic foundation of the internet.

And decisions were made throughout the internet's development in the 1970s through the 1990s not to regulate it, and fierce debate has raged over those decisions for decades. The explosion of data -- mainly video -- traveling over the internet in recent years has brought these issues closer to a head.

This is why Claffy and Krioukov say there needs to be some kind of regulation. Claffy said a good start would be something akin to an international bureau of internet statistics, some kind of bird's eye view of the entire system. Even the most basic data collection would allow researchers to see bottlenecks and other potential problems that can't be seen now.

But in order for such and entity to be created, those who own the largest networks in the internet -- internet providers like AT&T and Verizon -- would have to agree to share their data, something they have no incentive or requirement to do.

"The global structure of internet is the cumulative result of local decisions by individual organizations (owners)," Krioukov said. "There are about 20,000 of these owners -- and no one is requiring that these organizations play by a set of rules."

Many researchers are concerned that the lack of regulation and the self interest of the large owners will combine to intrude on what is essentially the freedom of the internet.

For example, the overload of data the internet is experiencing requires bigger, faster and much more expensive routers. And it is likely that the large providers will pass these costs down to consumers. The result could be a tiered service model in which the level of someone's internet access to depends on how much they are able to pay.

Others, especially business interests, say such advocacy for more regulation is a solution in search of a problem. Claffy believes the truth is somewhere in between. And she has spent her career trying to get at that truth.

The 39-year-old earned a bachelor's from Stanford University in 1989, and received a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from UCSD in 1994. Three years later she founded the data analysis association, dubbed CAIDA. Krioukov, also 39, is a native of St. Petersburg, Russia. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Old Dominion University in 1998, and came to work at CAIDA in 2004.

An hour long conversation with the two can cover just about all things great and small on the internet. Recently they've been working on great rather than small. The paper they co-authored for Nature Physics (along with Marian Boguñà, a researcher at the University of Barcelona, Spain) focused on the internet and how it relates to other complex networks.

The three researchers developed a mathematical model, called "hidden metric space." The model offers an explanation on how both man-made networks like the internet, and natural networks, like the human brain, are similarly affected by what is known as the "small-world phenomenon," in which two locations in any given network are, on average, no more than six steps from each other...

If developed further, this research could be an answer for the rising number of so-called internet "black holes," which happen when routers become so overwhelmed by information that they can't keep up, and links to parts of the internet end up severed. These black holes are slowing the work of researchers and other high-level users of the internet. And researchers say if not dealt with, black holes will ultimately affect the average user.

When will this day come, and how bad will it be? Good question.