Seumas Miller

Seumas Miller is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (an Australian Research Council Special Research Centre) at Charles Sturt University (Canberra) and the 3TU Centre for Ethics and Technology at Delft University of Technology (The Hague). He is the foundation director of CAPPE (2000-2007), Head of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at CSU 1994-9 and Professor of Philosophy at The Australian National University (2003-11). He is the author or co-author of over 150 academic articles and 15 books, including Investigative Ethics: Ethics for Police Detectives and Criminal Investigators (Blackwell, 2014), Security and Privacy (lead author John Kleinig) (ANU Press, 2012), Moral Foundations of Social Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Terrorism and Counter-terrorism: Ethics and Liberal Democracy (Blackwell, 2009), Corruption and Anti-corruption (Prentice Hall, 2005), Ethical Issues in Policing (Ashgate, 2005), and Social Action: A Teleological Account (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Security and Privacy »

Global Standards for Ethical Identity Management in Contemporary Liberal Democratic States

Authored by: John Kleinig, Peter Mameli, Seumas Miller, Douglas Salane, Adina Schwartz
Publication date: December 2011
This study is principally concerned with the ethical dimensions of identity management technology – electronic surveillance, the mining of personal data, and profiling – in the context of transnational crime and global terrorism. The ethical challenge at the heart of this study is to establish an acceptable and sustainable equilibrium between two central moral values in contemporary liberal democracies, namely, security and privacy. Both values are essential to individual liberty, but they come into conflict in times when civil order is threatened, as has been the case from late in the twentieth century, with the advent of global terrorism and trans-national crime. We seek to articulate legally sustainable, politically possible, and technologically feasible, global ethical standards for identity management technology and policies in liberal democracies in the contemporary global security context. Although the standards in question are to be understood as global ethical standards potentially to be adopted not only by the United States, but also by the European Union, India, Australasia, and other contemporary liberal democratic states, we take as our primary focus the tensions that have arisen between the United States and the European Union.