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

When I entered this class, I saw ethical debates in largely black and white terms – assessing right from wrong based more on emotion than principled reason. However, lessons challenging assumptions on issues like privacy, hacktivism and corporate cooperation expanded my one-dimensional perspectives. 

Examining hacker motives beyond legal definitions alone via “character-focused ethics” revealed nuances in breach scenarios I had ignored. I shifted from dismissing unauthorized access outright to a more contextual view – one balancing community protections in security research with individual rights. My key takeaway was recognizing multiple ethical lenses rather than reacting only to surface level harms.  

Similarly, studying history of “cross-partisan” disputes around surveillance requests reshaped rigid judgments that corporate resistance must indicate deceitful motives, when loyalty to user trust may drive such actions. Case contexts mattered profoundly. This taught me government investigation powers require oversight to prevent overreach violating civil liberties in the name of collective security. 

Additionally, class dialogue across staunch ideological divides on technology regulation opened my eyes to potentials for “aligning competing security principles” if grounded in core beliefs shared. I came to believe reactionary positions often overlook underlying values to build upon. My lesson was not allowing surface disagreements to obscure common ground for cooperation.

In total, through analyzing varied course materials on technological impacts, I deepened commitment to contextual, compassionate ethical reasoning and solutions-focused discourse that breaks barriers. Carrying forward, I will judge complex cyber issues along multidimensional spectra – weaving duty, outcomes and character to form measured opinions bridging divides rather than exacerbating them unreflectively.