Cybersecurity Ethics

This course examines ethical issues relevant to ethics for cybersecurity professionals, including privacy, professional code of conduct, practical conflicts between engineering ethics and business practices, individual and corporate social responsibility, ethical hacking, information warfare, and cyberwarfare. Students will gain a broad understanding of central issues in cyberethics and the ways that fundamental ethical theories relate to these core issues.

Course Material – Reflective Writing Assignment

Over the course of this ethics class, it has expanded my thoughts and realization on a great many points. This semester every student has analyzed the same cases and argued on both sides of each topic. Using one of the ethical reasoning as a stage to argue our own individual thoughts, we all in our minds were right, even though some students were on the opposite side of the spectrum arguing for what they believed to be right using possibly the same ethical reasoning. This to me, makes me appreciate the understanding that everyone in their mind is right, and at some basis, depending on the perspective, are right. That we as individuals rarely choose to do the wrong thing, for the sole purpose of it being wrong. We in our own minds have justified our actions in one way or another. This class has made me reflect on times where I choose a side on a bias belief, instead of viewing the opposite side’s argument through the lens of one the ethical reasoning tools.  

            One of the first case analysis that really stood out to me was the Privacy module in discussing where one’s privacy begins and under what principles privacy is defined. Prior to this semester it had not occurred to me that “privacy” could be defined under four separate tenets of physical, mental, decisional, and informational privacy, and that one could be impeded upon while the others remain intact. Privacy remains a topic of major discussion as society advances, it is up to the cybersecurity professionals within the community to ensure that our ethical decisions do not inhibit the privacy of individuals while still ensuring the safety of others. Entering this module it was my belief that the Google Street application did not interfere with the privacy of others, and this remains intact. From this module I took away a deeper understanding of the defined terms of privacy and how to better ensure that the privacy of others is not violated.

            This leads me to my second topic of Whistleblowing. The topic discussed within this module was appealing, that on one side there is an individual whose own belief system could be argued was operating under the reasoning of virtue ethics or consequentialism. That they were operating to save future lives, whereas on the opposite side, there is an ethical argument that what that individual did was wrong due to doing so for the wrong reasons. Both sides can be right or justified in their assessment, however it is up to the reader or professional to make that decision for themselves. Whistleblowing in itself is not wrong, however when done for the wrong reasons, can be wrong, alternatively, the wrong thing done for the right reasons can be right. When completing this assignment, I had to not unlocked virtue ethics, however after reading and understanding virtue ethics, the idea of whistleblowing becomes more complex, in that honesty and integrity weigh heavy when attempting to act in a virtuous way.

            Information warfare, through my experience, was a new profound way to conduct warfare on a strategic level. Conducted by nation states against one another or against their own populace, however it had not occurred to me that individuals, companies, or institutions could effectively conduct information warfare that has national or global impacts. I argued that the Facebook did not go against the ethical teachings of Ubuntu, however in a different perspective, they did go against other ethical teachings. Which relates to my original introduction that any point could be justified with an ethical tool. Either intentional or unintentional filtering of information during a presidential election has severe consequences. The actions of Facebook altered the way information was presented, which in turn went against the decisional privacy of its users, as well as the informational privacy of those who were linked to users. All these actions, again, in some ways were unethical and infringed upon users’ privacy. One could argue that in doing so, was in some way an act of warfare against society. From this I took away a greater understanding in how informational warfare is conducted, what all it encompasses.