Investigating the Ethics of Cyberwarfare
With the ever-growing presence of social networking sites — like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram — the world as generations before us knew and understood it is quickly disappearing. New versions of privacy invasion and threats not present in pre-World Wide Web societies are continuously emerging alongside each new technology.
Problems associated with an online footprint range from images “stolen” from a Facebook profile, email hacking and identity theft to the international dangers of cyber attacks — or cyberwarfare.
As the world develops better technologies and a deeper reliance on them, cyber attacks are also becoming more sophisticated and threatening to individuals and nations.
At Cal Poly, cyberwarfare scholarship concerns itself not only with how to combat increasingly exceptional technology, but the ethics involved with this new method of war. Earlier this year, Cal Poly Philosophy Professor Patrick Lin received a grant of nearly $500,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for “Safeguarding Cyberspace with Ethical Rules for Cyberwarfare,” a collaborative project with the Naval Postgraduate School and Western Michigan University.
Through the project, Lin and his team are seeking to address the ethics of cyberwarfare, an issue Lin said is not directly explored by policymakers and defense organizations. He points out that despite the growing amount of literature on cyberspace technology and strategy there is a noticeable gap in the study of ethics of cyberwarfare.
Lin describes the role of ethics in the emerging technologies, especially cyberspace innovations, as the foundation that guides law and policy.
“Cyberweapons are a technology that have advanced quickly in recent years,” Lin said. “Since much of it is covert work, there hasn’t been a lot of public discussion about how responsible nation-states should conduct cyberwar in a way that respects existing international law and ethical norms.”
Cyberwarfare, according to Lin, challenges existing frameworks governing armed conflict, including the assumption that war must require kinetic or physical attacks. Because military assets are difficult to penetrate, cyberwarfare poses a potential risk to civilian infrastructure.
“Clear international law and policy can help limit the impact of cyberwar on civilians and safeguard cyberspace itself,” Lin said. The project, thus, is seeking to discover how cyberwarfare conforms, or can be made to conform, to war principles such as discrimination and deception.
Among Lin’s collaborators on this project was Keith Abney, a senior lecturer for Cal Poly’s Philosophy Department.
The team will release their research findings through a university-level course on cyberspace ethics, media outreach, workshops, and a comprehensive report.
In line with Lin’s work, Cal Poly’s College of Engineering has recently established a Cybersecurity Center and has plans to open a new cyber lab in January 2014, positioning the university at the forefront of cybersecurity scholarship and as a leading supplier of cybersecurity experts and professionals.
Lin’s ethics-driven analysis of the realities of cyberwarfare, coupled with the engineering and scientific research being pursued on campus, is an example of Cal Poly’s mission to address issues impacting the technologies and human activities of our present and our future.