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

Throughout this semester, I have learned a lot of important concepts and skills that will help me in my future career and life. Not only that but these concepts have also helped me in my other classes as well. I found a lot of topics intersecting with other topics in my classes. There were several topics that stuck out to me throughout the course. Those topics being professional ethics, privacy, and whistle blowing. I feel as if these topics will help me the most in my future career. 

Professional ethics was a big learning curve for me in this course. I feel as if it is the most important skill set a person could have within a job field. At some point in our lives we will have to make personal decisions on what is right within our jobs and what is wrong. Professional ethics taught me that there are several factors that go into making a straight decision. Sometimes a decision is not always clear. A position I engaged with in dealing with this topic is the Sourour case. Sourour was a young developer who was hired by a company. And this company gave him the task to make a code promoting their new medicine. The only problem was this code was in a quiz form that no matter what the results were it recommended the new drug the company was trying to promote. Sourour didn’t feel as if the code was right to do in his heart but still did it and the result of that was people dying and having severe side effects from it. My position is still strong. I feel as if the code should not have been made and Sourour should have gone about his decision making better. He should have trusted himself from the start. A lesson that I’ve gained from this story is that not everything is clear at the moment. You know he gave reasons for why he went ahead and did the code against his judgment. When you’re in a situation like that and you can’t afford to mess up your career at the moment by not doing a service, decisions like this become hard. He didn’t know this outcome was going to happen. My takeaway from this would be to do what is best. If a decision at work is against my moral compass and will cause potential harm just scrap the idea even if I was to take a hit from my high reps. This can translate to all walks of life if anything feels wrong to do we don’t have to do it.

Privacy is the next problem that I feel is a big issue that we have today. When learning about this topic I truly realized how as American citizens we really don’t have much privacy at all. That is the nuance I gained. Not only that but the danger of technology constantly progressing puts more of a stress on privacy because we truly will never have it. Especially with social media apps, cyber criminals, data companies, and any institution we have to give our personal information over. In our case analysis for privacy we learned about Googlization and the problem with that. In short terms google decided to implement a street view process which was a good idea in hindsight. However within this process it caused them to violate people’s privacy from all across the world. Google would send these dash cams to record and visualize everything so they could publish to the internet so if someone needed to see or type in directions they would have a visualization of their destination. Google eventually blurred out important information and faces. But some of that wasn’t good enough for people. I have no change in my thoughts. I feel as if this was a wrong approach by Google. A good idea is just a terrible implementation in my opinion because it should have been a no-brainer to block out personal info from the beginning. They also should have reached out to countries and people first establishing privacy rights and protocols and even checking with the people to see if it was okay. A key takeaway from this case would be my ethical tool I chose being utilitarianism. It taught me that we should do the right thing not only for ourselves but everybody involved. I feel like this principle will go a long way in such as compromising and negotiating issues. 

The last topic that I engaged with that I feel relates directly to me is whistle blowing. I hope I never have to go down this road of whistle blowing for a company or organization. However considering I want to be a cybersecurity specialist it’s evident that I will be working with information and procedures. Because of that I feel like this case will help me the most. I gained nuance in realizing that not all whistleblowing is bad. Normally when I hear of whistle blowers it’s just bad representation and people treat people like they are the worst people on the planet. I now know that there are plenty of situations where whistle blowing is justifiable. I have a deeper understanding that you can whistle blow to save your organization or to keep them in line when you feel as if the outcome will have a negative effect on society. The case analysis I reviewed talked about the dark side of the U.S army. In this case Chelsea Manning exposed the U.S operation of army troops killing enemy soldiers. What made it so bad was on video it seems like the U.S troops killed these people for nothing. Not only did they abuse their power in killing, they also killed innocent people when it was not needed. My position on this is shaky. Because I understand both sides. I still feel as what the U.S did was wrong. However in a time of war where you’re not sure what the enemy soldier has I understand not wanting to take the risk of finding out. You rather it be them than you. And in my opinion that’s okay. It’s human nature to look out for yourself and the people you love trying to protect them so you all can make it back home. My position is still the same however that Manning did do the right thing in exposing the U.S for their actions. This was a good case of whistle blowing to me. War Crimes should not be allowed. It’s not something we would allow other countries to do. We are not an exception. Spreading light to the situation so there can be better practice is stricter rules is what we need. A key takeaway from this is standing up for what it is. In my field if it comes down to it I’m gonna have to make big decisions like this on whether or not to blow the whistle. I truly believe if it is morally wrong and will impact people in a negative manner then risking my reputation and job is what I will have to do.