ABSTRACT
And none of the prior instances addresses the ethical questions related to the cyberbehavior of governments (i.e., cyberwarfare,* privacy violations,† Internet blocking and censoring‡); or that of corporations (i.e., spying on employees,§ intellectual property theft¶); or the behavior of “hacktivist” communities such as Wikileaks** or Anonymous,†† and the Manning‡‡ and Snowden§§ incidents. * When should nations actually go to war in cyberspace? This has become the
Needless to say, as information technology started to expand and complement human cognition and enhance interconnectedness and communications, there developed a somewhat perplexing convergence of reality and virtuality that has exploded onto the scene with a brand-new set of ethical dilemmas around behavior in cyberspace. Hence, a need exists to focus on cyberethics as well as to provide some framework for people to behave responsibly online, especially when no one else is looking.*
There have been many attempts to develop codes of conduct for the field of computers dating back to the 1960s (Herold, 2006). The first professional code was adopted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1973 and shortly after that the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the British Computer Society (BCS), and the Australian Computer Society (ACS) all followed suit.
