Check out last week’s posts on Compliance Culture, in case you missed or want to revisit them.
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As previously discussed on this blog, the universe of the science fiction show Black Mirror is very interesting from a compliance and ethics perspective. As discussed in this post about the first three series of the show and this post about the fourth series, the show often focuses on connections between humanity and technology. The show frequently contemplates the negative impact of excessive or dangerous reliance on technology and warns of the disruptions to people and communities that could result from overly integrating advanced technology into life.
While the most common themes of Black Mirror indeed pertain to traditional risks of overuse of technology, such as data privacy, consent, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity, there’s an additional layer of commentary on the show which focuses on broader social issues, such as power, community, and justice. Indeed, the question of how a technologically-advanced society might define and handle justice uniquely is compelling. Portrayals of justice throughout all four series of Black Mirror include the treatment of issues such as punishment, reparations, confessions, investigations, judgment, and surveillance.
This is the sixth in a series of seven posts about regulatory compliance priorities and enforcement trends. The first post was about the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The second post was about the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The third post was about the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). The fourth post was about the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Last week’s post was about the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Today’s post will be about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Finally, the seventh post, on Thursday February 1, will be about the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the US regulator charged with supervising and enforcing federal laws concerning human health and the environment. The USDA was created in 1970 by an order of President Richard Nixon in the course of an executive reorganization that consolidated a number of offices and councils that were created by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. The EPA has never been formally elevated to executive cabinet status but is often accorded this rank operationally anyway.
The chocolate business has long been plagued with associations with slavery and child labor. In the countries where manufacturers buy their cocoa beans, trading companies and farmers traditionally have engaged in exploitative and unfair business practices both between each other and in employing the work of slaves, many of them children. Chocolatiers have even claimed that producing chocolate without the use of slave labor at some point in the supply chain, however remote, is impossible to prove or accomplish. Instead, the industry has focused on shifting risk or responsibility for the use of slave labor or abusive trade partnerships by moving these decisions and relationships to third parties and offering ignorance or lack of control as a defense.
Tony’s Chocolonely, a Dutch confectionary company, offers an intriguing alternative to and challenge within this market. The eponymous Tony is actually Teun van de Keuken, a Dutch investigative reporter. In 2002, van de Keuken was working on a project about chocolate manufacturers. He determined that none of the manufacturers he studied that had signed the 2001 Harkin-Engel (aka Cocoa) Protocol, an international agreement intended to end child and forced labor in chocolate production, were in full compliance with the protocol’s requirements. Therefore, all the chocolate for sale by those candy companies (including Hershey’s, M&M Mars, Nestle, and Guittard) was, in van de Keuken’s view, an illegally-manufactured product.
Imposters are a fascinating sub-set of fraudsters. Throughout history, individuals who have committed fraud for a variety of reasons – financial gain, social mobility, and even political or corporate espionage – by pretending to be someone they are not. Some of these people are repeat fraudsters, spending much of their lives assuming other identities and committing great amounts of time to working on complex backstories for their false identities, including disguises, accents, and fake community or cultural ties. In order to commit these fraudulent acts, imposters often make deft use of social networks and engineering, by falsely representing themselves in personal or business relationships and then using one misrepresented connection in order to forge subsequent ones.
In this respect, imposter fraud is often the proximate cause of many other types of fraud, creating the trust and credibility that provides access for the faker to commit his or her offenses. Therefore from an ethical culture perspective imposters are quite interesting to study, in order to ponder their motivations or the heuristics and expectations for honesty and evidence that allow their fraudulent efforts to succeed.
The ongoing public disclosures about sexual harassment and abuse that have filled the news since mid-2017 have led to a major cultural reckoning. Courageous people have come forward to share stories about inappropriate and dangerous behavior of high-profile individuals. The public discourse about these people who were violated by abusers and predators with the complicity or support of other individuals or organizations has, to this point, focused largely on bringing these offenses to light, in order to listen to and believe in victims, so that they may be supported and empowered as survivors and as bearers of new societal norms.
Be sure to visit Compliance Culture this week for posts on these topics.
Don’t miss it!
Check out last week’s posts on Compliance Culture, in case you missed or want to revisit them.
Many thanks for reading!
Black Mirror’s fourth season continues the themes of the previous three series of the show. As discussed in this post, the show makes often uncanny connections between human life and technology, frequently covering the ways in which social media, AI, biometric devices, and other advanced technological systems and devices affect and change society. What makes Black Mirror so effective, and often so disturbing, is that in each of the anthologized stories it contains not only a vision of the future but also a warning about the disruptions that would happen to people along the way. The reality depicted in Black Mirror is like an amped-up version of the world that seems to be already nearly within reach, with technological advancements abound to make life easier or more entertaining. However, the point of view in the show is markedly dystopian, forcing viewers to consider the addictive or even dangerous influence that immersive technologies could have.
This is the fifth in a series of seven posts about regulatory compliance priorities and enforcement trends. The first post was about the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The second post was about the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The third post was about the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). Last week’s post was about the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Today’s post will be about the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Next week’s post, on Thursday January 25, will be about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Finally, on Thursday February 1, the post will be about the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).