Final Ethics Project

"Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of – for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again". This is how Socrates perceives in a passage reputation. This argument ties to the case of Fidel Salina. Fidel Salina was pledged guilty of 44 felonies each carrying 10 years of prison for a total of 440 years of prison. The case, back in 2014 made the national news. The former anonymous hacker pledged guilty for hundreds of years of prison. The media stormed all over the country. But what really happened in his case? Was he really guilty? Apparently not, because after a few months from his plea, all his charges were dropped and reduced to a 10.000$ misdemeanor. In the documents released to the public, and from the media's opinion, his charges were against the fact that he'd spammed a woman website and email with contact requests. Nothing more has been released of what he actually did. What we know, is that "the only remaining one of those 44 felonies to which Salinas actually pleaded guilty—downgraded to a misdemeanor—was a computer fraud and abuse charge for repeatedly scanning the Hidalgo County website for vulnerabilities. Prosecutors argued the scans slowed down the site’s performance." So why did all of this happen in reality? It is said that Salina was actually approached by the FBI prior his convictions, to cooperate with them to get some information about the hacking group "anonymous". He obviously refused and this brought on him the wrath of the FBI itself, that with the help of the media ruined his entire reputation. Does this ring a bell? There are many other cases that look into this matter. Aaron Schwartz, the recent FBI vs Apple case and many more show how easy it is for the Federal government to ruin someone's reputation if they don't get any sort of collaboration. In the world we live right now, where people are fed with national media and more than half of the population does not do its proper research, reputation is really easy to destroy. But what happens when that reputation is destroyed? Well, if you are Apple, you have the assets to make things right in the right way, without having any major reputation losses, if you are Aaron Schwartz, well sadly we all know how that ended. How does someone then regain what is all lost? There is no way to do that, at least in the modern world. We are fragile human beings that are victims of a system we can't beat unless we have the assets. But probably this has been a problem since the beginning of time, where the oppressed have always lost when the masses were fed with the idea that their reputation was what it actually was not. Again, Socrates told us that: "The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; and if we observe, we shall find, that all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice of them". Who we are, is what we appear, but sometimes, other people can make us appear who we are really not, and compromise our spot in society.