2 - An Ethical Framework for Hacking Operations

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.