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Essay on Computer Ethics-2
Computer ethics lie between the computer security industry and the computer underground.
Computers and computer networks have helped organizations realize substantial gains in efficiency and effectiveness resulting in recent trends such as downsizing, empowerment, outsourcing, and constituency work forces. In fact, the root causes of these changes, business process redesign and reengineering, are grounded in the notion that technology enables fundamental changes in the ways that organizations can operate. However, the use of technology has also raised cause for concern.
Hacking has come to be defined increasingly as a potential threat to normative educational ethics and national security alike. In the face of the ethical complexities of hacking, there is perhaps a temptation to adopt the moral certainties contained within the polarised positions of them and us scenario. Such certainties reflect the technical environment within which they are formed:
Computer software is itself a markedly binary discourse. The binary logic of computer technology is vivid in its contrasts between ‘working’ and ‘not working’: on/off; zero/one; right/wrong. As one of the partners of a management consultancy with responsibility for computer reliability put it: Things are either right or wrong. It is a world which greys does not easily inhabit. And a small error doesn’t make it just a little bit wrong. (Woolgar and Russell 1990: 34) http://www.kreps.org/hackers/overheads/9ethicslect.pdf
Elements of the computer security industry vehemently oppose both the ‘playpen attitude’ advocated by elements of the computer underground and also their apparent unwillingness to equate computer crime with real-world illegality.
Presupposing that no destructive harm is done, hackers tend to believe that it is not wrong to explore systems without prior permission, whilst those concerned with the security of those systems would characterize such a belief as offensive:
Just because YOU have such a totally bankrupt sense of ethics and propriety, that shouldn’t put a burden on *me* to have to waste my time dealing with it. Life is short enough to not have it gratuitously wasted on self-righteous, immature fools….
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