Ethics Final Project Final Draft

Describe a Case

The case I have chosen is that of a hacker causing mass panic in Dallas by setting off all 156 emergency sirens at once. This attack happened on Friday April 7, 2017 around 11:40 p.m. and lasted until 1:20 am Saturday. This caused the 911 system to become flooded with over 4,400 calls from panicked residents. The hacker set of the sirens by compromising the Dallas city's emergency alert system. The residents were more frightened this time than any other time due to the timing of the attack considering earlier on in the day there was a terrorist attack in Sweden and on Thursday the US began attacking an air base in Syria. To pull off the weekend’s siren episode, hackers would have needed extensive knowledge of the frequencies and codes used in the Dallas siren system to make them all go off at once.


http://thehackernews.com/2017/04/dallas-tornado-siren-hack.html

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/08/us/dallas-alarm-hack/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/04/08/hacker-triggers-all-156-emergency-sirens-dallas/100212412/

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/dallas-siren-hack-wasnt-novel-just-really-loud/

Moral Reasoning

I am completely against this attack. I believe that the hacker was completely wrong and should be found and punished to the full extent of the law. This hacker designed this attack to scare everyone while they were all sleeping causing mass hysteria while also causing the 911 call center to become over worked. This may have caused many more problems than were originally intended due to there not being a fully functional 911 call center. The timing of this attack also caused people to become even more scared then they would have been if it was a storm warning because the weather was nice, but the U.S. had begun bombing an airport in Syria along with a terrorist attack that had occurred earlier on in the afternoon. The attackers had no care at all for the citizens of Dallas and their wellbeing. The attack caused the Office of Emergency Management to shut down the city's alarm system until Sunday.

Philosopher

The philosopher I chose is Aristotle.

http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/aristotle-the-nicomachean-ethics

“bad men... aim at getting more than their share of advantages, while in labor and public service they fall short of their share; and each man wishing for advantage to himself criticizes his neighbor and stands in his way; for if people do not watch it carefully the common weal is soon destroyed. The result is that they are in a state of faction, putting compulsion on each other but unwilling themselves to do what is just.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

Contextualize

Nichomachean ethics talks about Aristotle’s philosophy on the final end of mankind. Aristotle’s philosophy, in Nicomachean ethics, would agree that terrorists are fulfilling their purpose in life. This philosophical work by Aristotle relates heavily to this attack in Dallas done by a hacker, because he or she engaged in a form of cyber terrorism by setting off all the emergency sirens at once, causing mass hysteria and panic, much like terrorists aim to do when they execute an attack. The work of this hacker is what he or she believes is correct because of his/her reason or virtue when in fact it is nothing more than another form of terrorism. The hacker committed a crime and we may never know if this attack was used to cover up something else or how many people this really affected in the Dallas area. I chose this work by Aristotle because it relates to not only this attack, but all the terrorist attacks happening worldwide.