Tag Archive for: Ethics

Ethics of Cyber Warfare against Nation States | Articles

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Dear Editor, 

Ethics starts with determining the laws of war and trying to regulate what is considered legal in the eyes of international law. The additional protocols of the Geneva Convention in 1977 mentions the prevention of “an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination of thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated” (ICRC, 1977).

As a nation state, national security is one of the most important duties that involve protecting the government and its people. In the beginning, national security pertained to various types of military threats, while cyber security became a late addition to ongoing threats that no longer requires a declaration before taking action. Regardless of time and location, attacks can be conducted at any moment as long as there is access to the cyber world.

Conducting an offensive cyber warfare on a nation state can raise severe ethical issues for the public. Being completely different from any type of conventional weapon, the general population is at the greatest risk of being exposed to the destruction of its economy, energy, food, and critical infrastructure. A state’s critical infrastructure is composed of physical, non-physical, and cyber resources or support services that are necessary for society and its economy to function at its minimum standard.

Stuxnet is one of the earliest forms of cyber warfare where it achieved its goal of hindering Iran’s nuclear program for roughly a year. It was able to “launch an offensive on four companies” (Zetter, 2017) that had connections with the nuclear program. Delaying the progress of a nation state’s weapon capabilities might be one of the very few ethical attacks. Meanwhile, near-peer adversaries such as Russia has shown capabilities to interfere with elections and government affairs throughout the world and reap the benefits of chaos and instability.

In a way, cyber warfare against nation states have been long underway due to being a subject of uncertainty and the lack of enforcement by any…

Source…

Axon Ethics Board Pulls Plug On Facial Recognition Tech Being Added To Its Body Cameras

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One of the major players in cop tech is bowing out of the facial recognition race. As Hayley Tsukayama reports for the EFF, Axon (formerly Taser) has decided there are far too many ethical and practical concerns to move forward with adding facial recognition tech to its popular bodycams.

Axon actually has an ethics board — something that certainly would have been welcome back in its Taser sales days. Perhaps having a few ethical discussions would have prevented dead Americans from being awarded postmortem declarations of “excited delirium,” thus keeping law enforcement officers from being held accountable for killing people when they were only supposed to be arresting them.

The Axon ethics board has arrived at the following conclusion concerning facial recognition software:

Current face matching technology raises serious ethical concerns. In addition, there are technological limitations to using this technology on body cameras. Consistent with the board’s recommendation, Axon will not be commercializing face matching products on our body cameras…

There’s a caveat:

… at this time.

Facial recognition is tabled. But it’s not completely off the table. Axon can revisit this at any time and decide the ethical concerns are outweighed by public/officer safety and insert this software into the body cameras it sells as loss leaders to law enforcement.

Color me skeptical, but as great as this sounds (at this time…), Axon may just be waiting for the legislative dust to settle a bit before it moves forward with this bodycam enhancement. San Francisco recently banned the use of facial recognition tech by law enforcement and recent government hearings involving other players in the crowded field haven’t exactly created a receptive atmosphere for unproven surveillance tech more known for screwing up than catching criminals.

Whichever way the wind shifts, Axon is ready. It already deploys a form of facial recognition to redact bodycam footage for public release.

To date, Axon’s work on face recognition has revolved around detecting, tracking and re-identifying faces in videos for the purpose of blurring out or redacting those faces prior to public release, in service of protecting people’s privacy rights. “Re-identification” refers to the automated process of finding all the re-occurrences of a person’s face in a single video. These algorithms do not attempt to match the identity of the individual to a database, only to identify video frames that are likely to include faces so that they can be redacted.

While everything is sorted out, Axon will continue to solidify its lead in law enforcement adoption. Axon’s business model is smart, even if it’s not particularly new. Cash-strapped agencies are given cameras for next to nothing, but are tied into lucrative data/access contracts for years, allowing Axon to recoup the hardware costs with licensing and storage fees.

There’s nothing wrong with the way Axon handles its camera sales. It’s just something cities need to be aware of. Failure to live up to their end of the contract could see a city’s credit rating take a hit if it decides it would rather use another vendor.

This declaration is Axon setting the standard for the industry. As the industry leader, it can influence the decisions of other companies, taking them out of the game before they can even get on the playing field. Law enforcement agencies insisting on facial recognition tech will be seen as outliers and the companies willing to sell to them will appear to be operating unethically. It’s a smart move by Axon. I guess we should all enjoy the unintended side effects of Axon’s anti-facial recognition declaration while we can.

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Techdirt.

Medical device security ignites an ethics firestorm

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One security research company is taking a controversial approach to disclosing vulnerabilities: It’s publicizing the flaws as a way to tank a company’s stock.

The security firm, MedSec, made news on Thursday when it claimed that pacemakers and other health care products from St. Jude Medical contain vulnerabilities that expose them to hacks.

However, MedSec is also cashing in on the disclosure by partnering with an investment firm that’s betting against St. Jude Medical’s stock.

The whole affair is raising eyebrows around the security community. It may be the first time someone has tried to get compensated for discovering vulnerabilities by shorting a stock, said Casey Ellis, CEO of Bugcrowd, a bug bounty platform.

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Network World Security

Cyberwarfare ethics, or how Facebook could accidentally make its engineers … – Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

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Cyberwarfare ethics, or how Facebook could accidentally make its engineers …
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
Without clear rules for cyberwarfare, technology workers could find themselves fair game in enemy attacks and counterattacks. If they participate in military cyberoperations—intentionally or not—employees at Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo …

cyber warfare – read more