INVITATION TO CYBERSECURITY 256 gation, cybersecurity experts and ethical hackers must understand the law and the legal authorities and how they apply to their activities. Section 10.3 focuses on federal statutes and international law so that workers in the field of cybersecurity can know and abide by the law at all times. Section 10.4 concludes the chapter with a brief look at how ethics, rights, and laws intersect and how they could potentially come into conflict. 10.1 Ethics “These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way.” - Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis Cyberspace is a frontier world where clearly defined norms and rules of behavior are still emerging. Furthermore, many of the inherent dynamics of cyberspace contribute to a minimum of accountability, creating the temptation to take ethical shortcuts. Cybersecurity is about protecting the rights of individuals and organizations in cyberspace, and it is vital that practitioners act with integrity at all times, even when there is little fear of repercussions. This is a responsibility the field owes to society in return for the trust placed in cybersecurity experts. Studying ethics provides clarity for discerning right from wrong and conviction for operating with confidence. 10.1.1 Ethical Analysis “Doing ethics is not like finding the maximum element in a list…there are no algorithms that enable you to ‘solve’ a moral problem as neatly as you can construct a binary search tree.” - Ethics for the Information Age by Michael Quinn Cybersecurity professionals must develop the clarity to determine the difference between right and wrong and the character to make the right choice, even when nobody will probably ever know the difference. But how can one distinguish between right and wrong in the gray areas of cyberspace? In an ethical debate, appealing to intuition or divine inspiration are conversation stoppers because those bases for right and wrong cannot be meaningfully engaged with by others who do not share the same intuition or religious beliefs. Equally invalid are relativistic arguments such as, “It is true for you, but it is not true for me.” A subjective basis for right and wrong makes debate pointless. Without agreement on an objective reality, two people can come to opposite conclusions yet still both be “correct” in their own moral dimensions. Religious convictions provide the ethical standard for those who hold them, but one maynot be able to persuade others in a debate by appealing to a religious authority alone. For
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