Cryptography Attacks in the US - Research Paper Example

?Cryptography Attacks Cryptography is a science of communication that specializes in secure communication in the presence of a third party commonly referred to as adversaries. According to the Oxford English dictionary, an adversary is an enemy or a person who poses an amount of risk to others. Cryptography is a science of secure communication using unique codes to disguise the information thereby making it inaccessible by third parties. Presumably, the American government has a several enemies all of which will do anything to access some of the information in the government databases (Oded, 2001). This is further compounded by the constant need for government agencies to share information over the common means of communication such as the internet. Additionally, the numerous enemies of the government also use the normal means of communication and the government develops interest in obtaining some of their communications. This led the government to form the National Security Agency, this is a special state agency mandated with overseeing state communication and supervising all communications in the country with a view to averting threats to the country. The agency employs the best brains in communication technology and has some of the best cryptographers in the world. The besides coding government information for communication over the open networks, the agency looks for other strange codes in the American market and breaks them in the pretext of vigilance and the country’s security. Ethics and morality on the other hand refers to sets of behavior governing principles concerned with the right or wrong decision. Everyday activities present people with situations that require them to choose between right from wrong and good from bad. There is no universal standard of these but somehow people will always know from the actions of others whether a decision was right or wrong. The media as a means of communicating for the people presents a number of regulatory challenges some of which are ethical. The advent of the internet further worsened these scenarios by presenting virtually everyone with the ability to communicate to others and even become mass communicators. The internet has no assigned gatekeepers or regulators. The users reserve these powers a feature that puts them in very precarious situations. The operations of the National Security Agency and other hackers further worsen the scenario making the decision on wrong and right harder to make. Ethics and morality are behavior guidelines that reduce harm to others. By making an operative and acceptable choice between right and wrong or good and bad, a person secures the interest of another thus preventing an unnecessary harm to the other party. Such understandings further put government agencies such as the NSA in challenging situations (James, 2001). The agency searches and breaks millions of coded messages on a daily basis. After breaking the codes, the government official assesses them and those found safe later communicated to their recipients as intended and in the original format. The unsuspecting recipient thinks the message is safe, secure and highly secretive not knowing that government officials had the content before they got to him or her. This presents a great dilemma in the operations of the government since the need to protect the people is equally important to their fundamental right of privacy vested in the bill of rights. The government safeguards the country and every citizen in it. The American government will not allow any ill motive by anybody to cause harm or deaths of innocent Americans. To keep this promise the government, the government breaks a number of ethical principles such as accessing people private and confidential information. Some of the codes that the agency deciphers normally turn out to be communication between drug barons and not necessarily terrorists. The decoding process was necessitated by the rampant terrorist attack threats in the country. The government uses such information to impound the drug barons. This results in a massive ethical concern in the use of the internet and information technologies. Tracking drug peddlers and other petty offenders is a means of protecting the country in so doing making it safer. However, does the need for a safe country supersede the individual right to privacy. The right to privacy is a fundamental human right bestowed in the bill of right. The bill of rights further states that no one is to be exposed to arbitrary search without the approval of a state counsel, magistrate, or judge. Deciphering codes and accessing private information is a breach of such a provision, which is thus an open violation of basic human rights. This makes other users scared on the authenticity of the internet and the secure communication channels, which apparently are never secure. The government keeps such operations of the NSA highly secretive further raising ethical concerns. The technology of the force is unparalleled and nobody can possibly go through the numerous high tech firewalls it uses. It is therefore safe to assert that government databases are safe and may never receive an intruder ever. It thus beats logic for the government still to use such uncivilized methods of communication monitoring in the country. This causes discomfort to the users of the internet and the service providers such as Yahoo mail and the Google mail are bearing the implications while bearing financial losses, constant reminders that the government operates secretly stalking and breaching the privacy of the people it should protect (Oded, 2001). The internet further promises increased anonymity. Though the use of such applications as Google maps could reveal the presence of an individual, the internet does not reveal the user of the computer and or the place of use. This makes people say anything they feel like knowing that their safety and identity is guaranteed. Stalking people breaks such trust making the citizen live in more doubt about their safety. This has resulted in a lot of security concerns from other ill motivated people having advanced technology and may hack into government databases and reveal such information. Such an occurrence makes people more vulnerable than they actually were thereby casting doubt on the government role to protect them. People who decide to use codes to communicate messages that they could otherwise use the normal language do so because of the heightened need for confidentiality. Some of such people hire communication experts to package the information and send it over the network. They thus incur hefty costs to communicate the information that they eventually realize was never confidential. This is a betrayal to the people and means to financial loss since the costs incurred do not secure the information thereby making the communicators vulnerable to the government (Bruce, 1996). Following such information leaks, the government agencies organize raids on drug barons and other criminal activities thereby making the country safer. Drug menace affects the economy and jeopardizes strives that the government makes towards the restoration of peace in some of the notorious states in the country. Drugs are sources of mayhem and discord, they ruin the lives of millions of Americans and render some more incapable of meaningful employment. The government therefore owes the American population the safety that coincidentally the sale of drugs rubbishes. The government should do anything to ensure that it curbs the illegal trade and restore order in some of the states that trade in the commodity has denied peace. The question whether the anything includes tapping private communications and deciphering communication codes is justification enough. The government is auocratic over its operations and in most cases is never influenced by ethics and morality. It believes in safeguarding the security of the nation and will do all it takes without caring for the thoughts and opinions of the people. The only disadvantage of such policy is that it gives more authority to the people who also advance their use of the technology and become more creative. More people develop software that attempts to hack into government databases with the sole mandate of accessing the governed information. Some of these softwares are powerful enough to access other databases on the internet and this continues to make the internet a less secure place by the day. Most businesses extend to the internet with the introduction of plastic money and internet commerce. However, people continue to lose money on the internet as the intensity of cybercrime increases. Unfortunately, the software guarantee anonymity and the government do very little in protecting the public in such scenarios. References Bruce, S. (1996). Applied Cryptography, 2nd edition. New York: Wiley. James, G.(2001). Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies: How Spies and Codebreakers Helped Shape the Twentieth Century. Washington, D.C: Brassey's. Oded, G. (2001). Foundations of Cryptography, Volume 1: Basic Tools. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read More