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
Case Analysis 1 – https://sites.wp.odu.edu/jkrei002cyber/phil-355e/case-analysis-1/
Case Analysis 2- https://sites.wp.odu.edu/jkrei002cyber/phil-355e/case-analysis-2/
Throughout the PHIL355E many ideas have been brought into question and these questions have helped me look at ethical issues in a new light, one of these issues is in regards to data ethics in the USA compared to a place like the European Union. I was aware that America did have poor data privacy laws, but I do not think I truly understood before this class. I thought there was still a way for the government to intervene and some government intervention that is involved, but I have seen the opposite after viewing what the EU has done with their data privacy laws. While the EU has taken steps and bounds to help secure the people who live in their countries data, America has not taken that step. Therefore, through the lens of consequentialism it became apparent that that their needed to be some form of federal intervention when it comes to privacy in the states, because without their intervention Americans will be having their rights infringed upon.
Another key point that was brought up in PHIL 335E is the idea of professional ethics and in particular the way ethics in played into programming. Like many others I have not thought about the ramifications of a program, and how it can affect people. I never considered that a program can be used to manipulate people which could potentially be used for harm. This is because of my ignorance for the people who want these programs, I assumed that they would only use programming for good and to help people, but I was wrong and this part of the class showed me just that. In this section of class, we looked at a case of a programmer who made a website for a medicine company to help promote a product. The idea behind the website was to get people into the site and take a “quiz” to see what was the best medicine for them, but the truth was that the “quiz” was just used to manipulate the people who visited the site by only giving the result of the medicine from the medicine company and did not actually give the best result. This is a huge red flag, but it also adds to concern that later the programmer found out that the medicine they were promoting resulted in suicidal thoughts which may have resulted in your girls’ deaths. Without this class I would have never realized the true ethical issues that come with programming that need to be addressed, because if not there could be more deaths because of manipulation of users.
The Final key idea that I have learned about in PHIL 355E is about information warfare and how it is being used in unethical ways. Unlike some of the other topics I am aware of how the cyber space has started to change the land scape of war, but I did not consider the ethical issues that come along with it. Unlike “modern war” where there is an agreed upon ethical code that is used by most countries who were apart of the Geniva convention. There is nothing like this and security and it is currently actively being exploited, monitoring of people who the USA deems as “threats” is very lose and there are extraordinarily little protocols because they are normally not American. Furthermore, there are also cyber-attacks that are happening right now that target Hospitals and other critical infrastructure overseas. Without this class I would have never truly realized the lack of ethics in the web and information warfare and how I think there should be an establishment of something similar to the Geniva convention for the internet.