Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Final Ethics Project
For my final Ethics project I will look at te case of Fidel Salina, a former Anonyomous hacker who was pledged guilty of more than 44 felonies for a total of 440 years of prison. Salinas claims that the 440 years of prison time was intended to coerce him into hacking targets on behalf of the FBI, which he refused to do. I'd like to dig a little bit more into this case and see what's the FBI version and Salina's and describe the ethics involved in this particular case.
Salina in 2014 was dropped of all the charges and had only to pay a 10.000 dollar fee for a minor misdemeanor.
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Salina's dilemma of work for the FBI or do time seems to be a familiar theme. It seems that the government gets their best cyber security people from the ranks of cyber criminals. Does that present a moral issue for someone that goes from black hat to white? Now the person is helping capture people that were doing the same thing he/she was doing at one time. As a former cab driver I still feel a sense of loyalty to the cabbies in their fight against Uber and Lyft. What happens if a former black hat finds out that one of his former associates/friends is the criminal he is looking for? Where does his/her loyalty lie?
ReplyDeleteSalinas was being shuffled in and out of county facilities, being held exclusively in solitary confinement with no access to medical necessities or correspondence of any kind. As you know solitary confinement is also seen as a violation of due process and the Fourteenth Amendment, as “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment, and as an ethical issue because of the limits to health care that it imposes. More and more evidence shows that the US government is at war with hackers especially those who dare question its authority.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't the first time a situation like this has happened. There are several cases in the past where hackers were issued outrageous sentences then suddenly have them drastically downgraded. Laws regarding computer/cyber crimes are pretty vague and prosecutors lack computer/cyber understanding.
ReplyDeleteThis is always happening in movies, and in real life. Where the criminal is asked to go from the bad side to the good side. There is a moral dilemma for the criminal, who has to maybe snitch out on his/her friends that helped him/her, as well as a dilemma for the FBI that have to trust this person to help them fight that crime, because this criminal could eventually turn against them.
ReplyDeleteA wise axiom in the hacker community is that 20% of all hackers in the room are confidential informants, who will throw their fellow hackers under the bus for their respective pieces of silver.
ReplyDeleteAbout half of these (10% overall) will fabricate information in order to keep them in the good graces of their government handler. A fraction of them will work with their handlers to periodically entrap or entice someone into an illegal act that they would have never had any interest in committing.
Sometimes the percentages are way higher where half the room is snitching on the other half the room, which they in turn snitch on the other side. It ends up being a win-win situation for the government.