Course Description
Cyber Ethics is designed to teach students the proper techniques with which to approach the difficult ethical dilemmas that arise from using the modern Internet. In addition to providing students with the skills to assess future ethical dilemmas for themselves, Cyber Ethics also looks at some of the more pressing concerns related to Internet usage today.
Learning Objectives
The student will demonstrate an understanding of:
- The fundamental concepts, terms, and ideas required for an informed discussion on ethical topics
- A brief introduction to several commonly seen and referenced philosophies regarding ethics in general
- An overview of ethical business practices
- An intellectual object
- A review of current U.S. copyright law, how copyrights are obtained, other intellectual property issues; what an intellectual object is, how intellectual objects differ from traditional (physical) objects, and how those objects may be owned
- Explain the differences between those protections and copyrights
- Why professional codes of conduct are important for cybersecurity professionals
- Commonly used and invoked professional codes; employer/employee relationships and the impact those relationships have on the practice of 'whistle-blowing'; responsibility, accountability, and liability as they relate to professional codes of conduct
- Freedom of Speech on the Internet; issues surrounding speech on the Internet and the associated legal concerns; cyber-squatting, spam, and censorship; forms of speech that some argue are protected including pornography and hate speech; defamation on the Internet;
- Hacking, describing the two main categories of hackers, black hat hackers, their motivations, and their characteristics, 'white hat' hackers and key differences between white hat and black hat hackers; hacktivism, cybercrime, and cyberterrorism, and how those acts are similar and dissimilar.