Section 6-3
Information Ethics

Chapter 6-3-1
Computer Ethics

Peter S. Tippett

The computer security professional needs both to understand and to influence the behavior of everyday computer users. Traditionally, security managers have concentrated on building security into the system hardware and software, on developing procedures, and on educating end users about procedures and acceptable behavior. Now, the computer professional must also help develop the meaning of ethical computing and help influence computer end users to adopt notions of ethical computing into their everyday behavior.

Fundamental Changes to Society

Computer technology has changed the practical meaning of many important, even fundamental, human and societal concepts. Although most computer professionals would agree that computers change nothing about human ethics, computer and information technologies have caused and will pose many new problems. Indeed, computers have changed the nature and scope of accessing and manipulating information and communications. As a result, computers and computer communications will significantly change the nature and scope of many of the concepts most basic to society. The changes will be as pervasive and all encompassing as the changes accompanying earlier shifts from a society dependent on hunters and gatherers to one that was more agrarian to an industrial society.

Charlie Chaplin once observed, “The progress of science is far ahead of man’s ethical behavior.” The rapid changes that computing technology and the digital revolution have brought and will bring are at least as profound as the changes prompted by the industrial revolution. This time, however, the transformation will be compressed into a much shorter time frame.

It will not be known for several generations whether the societal changes that follow from the digital revolution will be as fundamental as those caused by the combination of easy transportation, pervasive and near-instantaneous news, and inexpensive worldwide communication brought on by the industrial and radio revolutions. However, there is little doubt that the digital age is already causing significant changes in ways that are not yet fully appreciated.

Some of those changes are bad. For example, combining the known costs of the apparent unethical and illegal uses of computer and information technology — factors such as telephone and PBX fraud, computer viruses, and digital piracy — amounts to several billion dollars annually. When these obvious problems are combined with the kinds of computing behavior that society does not yet fully comprehend as unethical and that society has not yet labeled illegal or antisocial, it is clear that a great computer ethics void exists.

No Sandbox Training

By the time children are six years old, they learn that eating grasshoppers and worms is socially unacceptable. Of course, six-year-olds would not say it quite that way. To express society’s wishes, children say something more like: “Eeewwww!, Yich! Johnny, you are not going to eat that worm are you?”

As it turns out, medical science shows that there is nothing physically dangerous or wrong with eating worms or grasshoppers. Eating them would not normally make people sick or otherwise cause physical harm. But children quickly learn at the gut level to abhor this kind of behavior — along with a whole raft of other behavior. What is more, no obvious rule exists that leads to this gut-feeling behavior. No laws, church doctrine, school curriculum, or parental guides specifically address the issue of eating worms and grasshoppers. Yet, even without structured rules or codes, society clearly gives a consistent message about this. Adults take the concept as being so fundamental that it is called common sense.

By the time children reach the age of ten, they have a pretty clear idea of what is right and wrong, and what is acceptable and unacceptable. These distinctions are learned from parents, siblings, extended families, neighbors, acquaintances, and schools, as well as from rituals like holiday celebrations and from radio, television, music, magazines, and many other influences.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for being taught what kind of computing behavior is repugnant. Parents, teachers, neighbors, acquaintances, rituals, and other parts of society simply have not been able to provide influence or insight based on generations of experience. Information technology is so new that these people and institutions simply have no experience to draw on. The would-be teachers are as much in the dark as those who need to be taught.

A whole generation of computer and information system users exists. This generation is more than one hundred million strong and growing. Soon information system users will include nearly every literate individual on earth. Members of this new generation have not yet had their sandbox training. Computer and information users, computer security professionals included, are simply winging it.

Computer users are less likely to know the full consequences of many of their actions than they would be if they could lean on the collective family, group, and societal experiences for guidance. Since society has not yet established much of what will become common sense for computing, individuals must actively think about what makes sense and what does not. To decide whether a given action makes sense, users must take into account whether the action would be right not only for themselves personally but also for their peers, businesses, families, extended families, communities, and society as a whole. Computer users must also consider short-term, mid-term, and long-term ramifications of each of the potential actions as they apply to each of these groups. Since no individual can conceivably take all of this into consideration before performing a given action, human beings need to rely on guides such as habit, rules, ritual, and peer pressure. People need to understand without thinking about it, and for that, someone needs to develop and disseminate ethics for the computer generation.

Computer security professionals must lead the way in educating the digital society about policies and procedures and behavior that clearly can be discerned as right or wrong. The education process involves defining those issues that will become gut feelings, common sense, and acceptable etiquette of the whole society of end users. Computer professionals need to help develop and disseminate the rituals, celebrations, habits, and beliefs for users.

In other words, they are the pivotal people responsible for both defining computer ethics and disseminating their understanding to the computer-using public.