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The Ethics of Economic Espionage
- Ross W. Bellaby
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- Journal:
- Ethics & International Affairs / Volume 37 / Issue 2 / Summer 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 29 August 2023, pp. 116-133
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The ethical value of intelligence lies in its crucial role in safeguarding individuals from harm by detecting, locating, and preventing threats. As part of this undertaking, intelligence can include protecting the economic well-being of the political community and its people. Intelligence, however, also entails causing people harm when it violates their vital interests through its operations. The challenge, therefore, is how to reconcile this tension, which Cécile Fabre's recent book Spying through a Glass Darkly does by arguing for the “ongoing and preemptive imposition of defensive harm.” Fabre applies this underlying argument to the specifics of economic espionage to argue that while states, businesses, and individuals do have a general right over their information that prevents others from accessing it, such protections can be forfeited or overridden when there is a potential threat to the fundamental rights of third parties. This essay argues, however, that Fabre's discussion on economic espionage overlooks important additional proportionality and discrimination concerns that need to be accounted for. In addition to the privacy violations it causes, economic espionage can cause harms to people's other vital interests, including their physical and mental well-being and autonomy. Given the complex way in which the economy interlinks with people's lives and society, harms to one economic actor will have repercussions on those secondary economic entities dependent on them, such as workers, buyers, and investors. This, in turn, can produce further harms on other economic actors, causing damages to ripple outward across society.
6 - Looking Back, Moving Forward
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp 107-122
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Summary
Introduction
As outlined in the Introduction, it is not the aim of the ethical framework to inadvertently open the door to all private forms of political violence, nor is it to justify all hacking; the purpose is to highlight the space for hackers to operate as legitimate actors and to guide hacker activity by detailing what actions are justified toward what end. Following the detailing of the ethical framework in Chapters 1 and 2, and the application in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, there are two further tasks. One is to establish some critical mechanisms – both theoretical and practical – to stop abuse and to aid hackers in reaching ethically justified decisions. The second is to widen the perspective to examine what implications this work has on how society should respond and reconceptualize political hacking. This includes a reflection on how existing legal and social frameworks are reacting to political hacking most broadly in order to highlight how they can better reflect the central argument for an (un)ethical hacker, a reconceptualization of ‘security’, and the argument for a more open and engaged set of state actors.
Limiting the abuse
Right intention
One of the key challenges with an ethical framework like the one outlined in this book is the potential for abuse. This can include using the ethical framework to justify one's actions by meeting the criteria superficially in a check-list approach, resulting in unjustified harm or personal gain masquerading as an ethical benefit. Such abuse is an established challenge for all ethical frameworks, especially those that argue for the justification of defensive harm or are seen to work in a ‘box-ticking’ manner. In limiting this potential for abuse it is essential to stress and reflect on both the theoretical underpinning of the ethical framework itself in order to avoid abuse through superficial engagement, as well as some of the practical mechanisms that can be entrenched to aid in a fuller and correct critical reflection and engagement with the theoretical principles. As Candice Delmas argues, such reflective constraints are necessary and useful as they help distinguish between ‘the Ku Klux Klan's vigilante terrorism and self-defence ⦠of the Deacons Defence ⦠or between British feminist street artist Bambi's politically conscious graffiti and swastika vandalism’ (Delmas, 2018b: 48).
References
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
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- Bristol University Press
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- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp 126-151
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The Ethics of Hacking
- Ross W. Bellaby
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- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 24 March 2023
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Political hackers, like the infamous Anonymous collective, have demonstrated their willingness to use political violence to further their agendas. However, many of their causes - targeting terrorist groups, fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, and protecting people's freedom of expression, autonomy and privacy - are intuitively good things to fight for.
This book will create a new framework that argues that when the state fails to protect people, hackers can intervene and evaluates the hacking based on the political or social circumstances. It highlights the space for hackers to operate as legitimate actors; guides hacker activity by detailing what actions are justified toward what end; outlines mechanisms to aid hackers in reaching ethically justified decisions; and directs the political community on how to react to these political hackers.
Applying this framework to the most pivotal hacking operations within the last two decades, including the Arab Spring, police brutality in the USA and the Nigerian and Ugandan governments' announcements of homophobic legislation, it offers a unique contribution to conceptualising hacking as a contemporary political activity.
5 - Correcting the Failure of the State
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp 94-106
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Summary
Introduction
The previous chapters looked at the importance of people's vital interest in maintaining their autonomy, privacy and liberty, exploring how these interests manifested through various information rights, especially the freedom of speech, association and right to access relevant and important information. These chapters reflected the focus on information freedom that many hackers, especially Anonymous, have placed as a core of their political agenda. This chapter will build on these cases, expanding to look at non-cyber, non-information related threats, including when the state and its representatives fail to, first, provide and enact good laws equally and fairly, including the failure to apply fair processes, equal treatment, misapplying laws, and lacking the ability and political will to enforce the good laws; or second, when the state develops unjustifiably harmful laws, policies, procedures or institutional cultures. It will be argued that in both instances, given the failure of the state and the subsequent threat these failures represent, hackers can use political violence to defend people from harm, though the type of response must be matched to the threat posed. This chapter will look at police brutality, the failure of due and fair process, the development of laws that seek to directly discriminate and foster hatred and violence against members of the LGBTQ+ community, and the locating and unmasking of online paedophiles.
The value of good laws
Chapter 2 argued that when people come under threat there is value in any agent defending them, even if in that defence they cause the threatening agent harm. The political hacks examined here again all necessarily involve a clear coercive (or the threat of a coercive) element against a threatening agent, most often the state or its local representatives, but where the aim is to correct the misapplication of good laws or to prevent what Les Johnson referred to as ‘evil laws’ (Johnston, 1996). These attacks are performed outside the usual and state-sanctioned mechanisms for remedying or appealing bad state behaviour, and arguably a form of ‘idealized citizenship’ where the legitimacy of the political hacker's actions are determined by what the state should be doing in an idealized situation. This importantly distinguishes it from acts of private political violence that promote hatred, division and hate crimes, as they aim to protect or provide for people's vital interests.
Dedication
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
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- Bristol University Press
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- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp iii-iv
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Introduction
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
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- Bristol University Press
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- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp 1-15
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Summary
Over the last two decades, political hackers, like the infamous Anonymous collective, have demonstrated their digital power and a willingness to use that power for their own political agenda. As communications, data, finances, activities, businesses and personal information become increasingly digitized and realized through the Internet, the birth of the modern information nation means that states and individuals are significantly dependent on cyberspace to survive, something that has not escaped the attention of the hacking community. Indeed, hackers have proven that they can exert significant power over individuals, corporations and even states, illustrating their technical ability and desire to influence the world through cyber-attacks. During this time they have shut down government websites across the globe; hacked Amazon, PayPal and Mastercard, costing $5.5 million in damages; aided in the Arab Spring revolutions by enabling secure communication between revolutionaries; released private corporate information; and attacked media companies over anti-piracy. And most recently, they have declared war on the Russian Federation following the invasion of Ukraine, releasing military information and hijacking state-owned media (Chirinos, 2022; Tidy, 2022). However, in a world increasingly obsessed with superheroes and villains, what do hackers represent?
On the one hand, political hackers have been criticized and automatically denounced for acting outside the state apparatus, taking the law into their own hands (Thomas, 2002; Serracino-Inglott, 2013; Klein, 2015; Trottier, 2017; Loveluck, 2020). Their use of violence is seen as a tool to further their political ends, coupled with no direct means for controlling their activity, resulting in concerns that they represent a threat to society's stability and the state's monopoly on the use of violence. They have been condemned for wielding too much personal power, with no official practical or ethical oversight, and protected by a cloak of anonymity that only serves to further empower and embolden them. While, on the other hand, many of their causes – protecting people's freedom of expression, autonomy and privacy, balancing the power of the state, and fighting for LGBTQ+ rights – are intuitively good things to fight for (Ford, 2012; Littauer, 2013). Indeed, they have developed a political ethos that prioritizes protecting people from a variety of harms while furthering the value that cyberspace and the Internet can play in people's lives.
3 - Political Autonomy, the Arab Spring and Anonymous
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
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- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp 53-72
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Summary
Introduction
Over their relatively short history, hackers have embarked on a broad range of different political conversations, debates, movements, events and issues, and have used a diverse array of methods ranging from online graffiti, virtual-sit-ins, message dissemination and protest organizing, to distributed-denial of services (DDoS) attacks, secret document leaking, and the launching of viruses, all with the purpose of utilizing their (threat of) coercive power and influence to effect change. Even within a single operation, the tools used and the political agenda sought can flow and change throughout its lifetime, raising a variety of different ethical questions and debates as a result. Given this fluidity it is challenging to create distinct breaks between the chapters focusing only on specific hacking tools. Instead, broad themes based on the general ethos and political objectives sought by the hackers can be established to help categorize and then facilitate the ethical evaluation. This chapter will focus on operations whose purpose is concerned with political autonomy: that is, restoring, protecting or enabling the individual's and social group's ability to act with their autonomy intact and to use that autonomy to act as political beings. This includes operations whose objective is providing for people's rights in expression, association, access to information and political engagement, and, importantly, how cyberspace has come to play a fundamental role in each of their realizations.
Some of the most infamous examples of hacking operations in this area involve those carried out as part of the Arab Spring revolutions between 2010 and 2012, where Anonymous aided the emerging protest movements throughout the region by shutting down government websites through DDoS attacks, and helping dissidents circumvent online censorship by providing ‘online care packages’ that allowed anonymous online communication and access to information. This included Operation Tunisia, where on 2 January 2010 Anonymous began landing successful DDoS attacks against several Tunisian government websites, including those belonging to the president, prime minister, Ministry of Industry, minister of foreign affairs, stock exchange and the government Internet agency that had been censoring online dissidence. This was followed by Operation Egypt, starting on 26 January 2011, using DDoS attacks on Egyptian cabinet ministers and providing online technologies to aid communications during the protests. And in 2012, Anonymous attacked Syrian government websites to fight government censorship (Greenberg, 2012b).
Index
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
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- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp 152-154
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Frontmatter
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
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- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp i-ii
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1 - Hacks, Hackers and Political Hacking
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
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- Bristol University Press
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- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp 16-31
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Summary
Introduction
The rise of the political-hacker phenomenon over the last two decades is something distinctive from instances of simple boasting, ransomware hijackers making money, or chaos creating malcontents. Part of this distinctiveness is both the political agenda these hackers have come to possess, as well as the necessary use of violence as part of them furthering their political end. Importantly, however, the form of this violence, level of negative impact inflicted and the type of targets chosen can all vary dramatically across operations, which can shape whether or not the hack can be justified. Therefore, this chapter will outline a spectrum of political violence, arguing that depending on what the target is, and how and to what extent it is negatively impacted, as well as the associated political context, the level of violence can vary. This will allow different hacks to be placed across a spectrum of political violence. This will enable Chapter 2 to develop a similar spectrum of justification that can determine if and when a particular activity or operation is justified, given the level of violence used compared to the ends and political context. This spectrum approach allows for the diverse set of hacking operations to be examined in greater depth, detailing the political objectives the hackers work towards, the methods used, and those who are impacted and in what ways. This will enable a better understanding of what politically motivated hacking looks like and how the highly varied actions used by hackers can compare and receive different justifications or denouncements according to the situation.
The evolving history of hacking and the birth of a political Anonymous
Online rights and freedoms
Historically, the broad hacker culture finds its origins in the 1950s within MIT's student organization ‘Tech Model Railroad Club’ – a group of students who shared a passion for understanding how things worked that naturally developed into the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes. Though initially driven by technical curiosity, over the following decades hackers started to use their skills to promote their own political beliefs and agendas (Levy, 1984). These first-generation hackers were broadly motivated by pro-freedom of information, anti-authoritarian, anti-nuclear and anti-capitalist sentiments, with many of these ideals still being pertinent in today's modern hackers.
Conclusion
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
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- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp 123-125
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Summary
The nature of political hacking represents a clear challenge to the legitimate use of political violence. It acts outside the traditional state infrastructures and mechanisms, and often against the state itself, which for many means that regardless of what good it brings it should be ethically discounted as an illegitimate actor threatening the social stability. Concerns over the ability of hackers to cause significant damage or harm to people's lives and the critical infrastructure of the political community do have some merit. They are a highly closeted, elite and unknown quantity; their branding is menacing and for those on the outside there does not seem to be any means of controlling what they do. Indeed, the state has a long-held dominance as the only legitimate actor to use violence for good reason, including protecting people from harm, arbitrating disagreements and facilitating that the correct quantum of impact is being delivered to the correct people. However, this is becoming increasingly challenged, not least because the state and its representatives have shown themselves to be a direct threat to people's vital interests. As such there can be an ethical space for political hacking when it acts to protect people from harm.
In order to make this determination, however, there is a need for an explicit and systematic ethical framework that can recognize the ethical value of political hacking. One which helps guide the hacker community with clearer fundamental ethical principles, as well as how these principles can then be manifested in various mechanisms for guiding ethical behaviour, highlighting to the rest of the political community when to leave the hackers alone, and how this might work through real-world illustrative examples.
It has therefore been argued that the state should not be the only actor to use political violence and that its own use is not inherently legitimate without qualification. Its value is drawn from the role it plays in representing and protecting the political community. When it fails in this role, either generally or in specific instances, then others can and should act – including hackers. Therefore, at its core, there is a value in protecting people from harm regardless of who it is that delivers that protection. This right to the defence of others means that hackers can use political violence against those who represent a sufficient level of threat.
4 - Leaks: From Whistleblowing to Doxxing
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 24 March 2023, pp 73-93
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Summary
Digital release of privileged information can sit both at the periphery of political hacking as well as being a key part of it, depending on how you see the broader hacking phenomenon and which cases are examined. In terms of whistleblowing and the WikiLeaks and Snowden revelations, for example, they are not inherently cases of political hacking since hacking was not the means of gaining or releasing the information. But there are connected arguments regarding the right to know and the importance of revealing wrongdoing that means they are often discussed in tandem, as well as them spawning specific hacking operations – Operation Payback/Operation Avenge Assange – when governments and corporations moved to restrict the leaked information. In comparison, there are those information leaks that necessarily rely on the political hacker on the outside of an organization gaining access to a network, taking inside privileged information and sharing it more widely. For example, when Anonymous hacked into the private security company Stratfor and copied and placed on a public forum 200 gigabytes worth of data. Part of this involves gaining unauthorized access to a targeted system by ‘taking advantage of one of the points of entry into a network’, including ‘electronic mail, remote logins ⦠or telnets’. Once inside, the hacker grants themselves privileges that allow them to alter the system's code or steal confidential information (Milone, 2002). These operations represent an updated form of leaking and throw up additional questions about when the hacker can target specific institutions, whether they are justified in breaking into their systems, and then what sort of information releases are allowed. Finally, there are also information releases that concern private individuals, whereby a person's personal information is collected and shared publicly.
To evaluate these different types of information releases, this chapter will detail the underlying ethical arguments for leaks most broadly, as this, in turn, shapes how both the retaliation hacks as well as penetrative information gathering hacks are to be judged. To help classify the discussion, those information leaks involving insiders using their privileged position to collect and then distribute information will be referred to as whistleblowing.1 In comparison, those instances where an outsider gains access to internal information and shares it widely will be referred to as ‘doxxing’ (a neologism originating from a spelling alteration of the abbreviation ‘docs’, a shorter version of ‘documents’).
2 - An Ethical Framework for Hacking Operations
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 January 2024
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- 24 March 2023, pp 32-52
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Summary
Introduction
Large, politically orientated hacker collectives such as Anonymous have targeted a range of actors over a diverse set of issues, all without a consistent set of ethical principles to guide or evaluate their activity. As previously noted, the challenge is that these actions by hackers necessarily use harmful or damaging actions on people or systems as a direct means of furthering their political goals, outside official systems sanctioned by the political community. But this does not inherently dismiss their actions as unjustified. Rather, it will be argued here that such actions can be justified when used to protect people from harm as a form of self-defence. To make this argument, this chapter will create an ethical framework based on the argument that people have a core set of vital interests that need to be protected, including maintaining one's physical and psychological integrity, autonomy, liberty and privacy. This need for protection creates a right to self-defence, including the right to defend others when they are threatened;, and when there are no other actors – whether it is due to a lack of ability, political will or because the state is the source of the threat – there to offer that protection then political hackers can fill the void. It will also argue that the right to be defended from harm is more important than waiting for state actors to offer the protection, and so just because hackers are outside the state does not automatically discount them as ethical actors. Another part of this ethical framework is the argument that both the political violence used by the political hackers and the self-defence justification expressed can exist to varying degrees. That is, the greater the level of damage caused by the political hack, the greater the threat it is countering needs to be to make it justified. As a result, this ethical framework will then form the basis of the ethical debates in future chapters and give guidance on how society should react to these political hackers. To achieve this, it is first necessary to highlight the potential ethical role of the hacker; second, is to outline the essential criteria that need to be fulfilled for the act of political hacking to be justified, detailing what actions are justified towards what end; and third, to offer mechanisms that can aid in reaching these ethically justified decisions.
Contents
- Ross W. Bellaby, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- The Ethics of Hacking
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 24 March 2023, pp v-vi
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