Ethics and Computing

In class we discussed an internet attack DDoS, or distributed denial of service. I found this article, Spamhaus vs Cyberbunker  on arstechnica, a very interesting look into massive scale DDoS attacks.  Summarizing the article, Spamhaus is a major anti-spam company while Cyberbunker is a major spam, among other questionable things, hoster. Due to Spamhaus blacklisting them, Cyberbunker decided to retaliate through internet warfare.

Because Cyberbunker has unbelievable resources they generated an attack reaching 300 Gb/s in bandwidth. This kind of attack would take down all but the most prepared web services. Cyberbunker has the motto about hosting which goes something like anything goes ‘except child porn and anything related to terrorism’. With Cyberbunker generating so much traffic the backbone tier 1 routers could go down. This could disrupt THE ENTIRE internet. In my opinion, this is terrorism. The internet is such a precious resource I believe we need to take an active role in protecting it.

The United States government is happy to go abroad and foil terrorist and other illegal efforts. Should they get involved in this battle? If we were to get involved, would it be to directly undermine the government (the Netherlands) since they fail to control Cyberbunker? Possibly a third option, if a country is unwilling or unable to disrupt its own terrorist activities, should we take action onto that country?

This article covers a few high profile cases related to intellectual property. It discuses how Apple is looking to patent “a combination of a sensor, processor and what Apple calls a ‘protective mechanism’ all within the handheld device.” Google is fighting anti-trust law suit which allegates that Google promotes its own travel services too widely, “stifl[ing] competition in the advertising industry.” Disney and other production companies sued Isohunt claiming they facilitate copyright infringement.

The case with Apple is an excellent example of how the patent system can stifle creativity and progress. Their description is so generic that it will prevent any company from devloping a protective device even if it uses an entirely different methodology to achieve the same goal. Apple is trying to patent the entire concept of protecting a “handheld device”, not just a method of doing so. This case shows the legal processes and protections undermining undermining progress.

The case with Google counterpoints Apple by showing how a company has thrived in the face of government opposition by creating an effective advertisement system without attempting to prevent other companies from doing the same.

Lastly the case involving Isohunt illustrates the paradox of how intellectual property rights are handled. Isohunt provides the ability for users to share torrrents similarly to how Google allows users to share content on Youtube or provide their [Googles] search functionality. Disney and Paramount Pictures are not suing Google in spite of the numerous links and videos that infringe upon copyright on a much larger scale, so why Isohunt? It appears these companies are preying on a weaker company in order to set or reinforcea legal precedence.

And yet, a persons property is do with what they wish, so by purchasing an album they may give it to whomever they wish. However, sharing the album with millions of people is clearly a violation of fair use, or is it?

A study done by the Institue for Prospective Technological Studies (European Commission) concludes that there would be a 2% drop in legal music sales if illegal filesharing web sites did not exist. Their research also showed that the majority of people who download music illegally would not buy music even if there were no filesharing sites. Other studies corroborate this claiming filesharers spend 30% more on music than those who do not fileshare.

With evidence that claims immoral  actions, according to Katianism or Rule Utilitarianism, actually profit for the people claiming to be harmed what are we to do?

So the first article on this manual that I saw can be found here. It states that lawyers, professors, and officers from NATO countries have gotten together to write the new rules of cyber warfare and that it is currently being review by NATO as to whether it should be adopted as policy. Curious, I searched for more articles on the manual, since it hasn’t been published and, on top of that, is over 200 pages long. I found a great article on RT News that described several of the details very well.

I found this line very troubling: “But while civilians cannot be lawfully targeted with such an attack, the experts write, persons unaligned to a military can still be considered fair game for assault — with cyber weapons or otherwise—if they pose a threat.” I may be jumping to conclusions here, but if hackers are now considered terrorists, then would this give the US government the ability to use drones to kill Americans? After all, the only excuse that the government seems to give on why we’re committing drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, etc., is because they are terrorists.

Another issue to be addressed is, when is a person no longer considered militant? For example, say a hacktivist in the US was attacking the Tunisian government during the Gaddafi conflicts. After Gaddafi was killed and control of the control turned over to the rebels, the hacktivist quit his dubious hacking and got a job with some software company. How far into the future will NATO forces be able to kill/capture/whatever him? In the digital age it’s nearly impossible to traverse the Internet without leaving some digital footprints, so it’s not beyond feasibility to think that a person could be discovered years after the fact.

One final issue I have with this is that if NATO forces decide to adopt this position, our adversaries will be allowed to legally send drone attacks or whatever other means within our borders and kill our citizens. If the Chinese have evidence that a hacker from Omaha attacked a company that stole patented designs from his brother’s business, then manufactured the goods for less and essentially ruined the business (we’ve all heard the stories),then they would be justified and within the rules of war to fly a missile into the US and take out that hacker in Omaha. I feel like this manual is opening many, many more doors than it’s closing.
“An act of direct participation in hostilities by civilians renders them liable to be attacked, by cyber or other lawful means,” reads an excerpt from the manual.

I ran across this story a few days ago and think it is very relevant to the issues of privacy we have been discussing in class. To summarize the news story the search engine giant Google has recently paid out 7 million dollars to 38 states after being caught capturing and storing unencrypted Wi-Fi traffic and passwords while capturing photos for its Street View service. Although this article doesn’t go into it much Google is blaming this privacy infringement on faulty software and a corrupt employee. Although it is suspected that several Google managers where aware of the employees intentions and did nothing to stop it.

Most shocking is the FCCs nearly unphased reaction to the obvious infringement of privacy stating: “wasn’t clear that Google violated federal wiretap laws by collecting unencrypted personal data that people transmitted over their wireless home (Wi-Fi) networks” and issuing the multi-billion dollar company a petty 25,000 dollar fine. So, just because your traffic is unencrypted does it give someone (namely Google) the right to collect and store it? Another thing this article neglects to mention is that Google is able to map all of this personal information to your home address by triangulating the Wi-Fi signal. So, what does everyone think, is the FCC right? just because your Wi-Fi isn’t encrypted does Google have the right to collect passwords and personal information(with your address attached to it)? or is do people have the right to privacy no matter how encrypted(or not encrypted) it is?