IT-related Professional Issues - Essay Example

? IT-related Professional Issues and IT-related Professional Issues Introduction The world isfast becoming information-driven. The value of information as a commodity has exponentially increased with the technological invention and innovation that is currently taking place. The Information technology industry is one of the world’s most rapid changing industries. It is constantly evolving and developing and its dimensions ever expanding and diversifying (Strassman, 2000). This development has however not been accompanied by the corresponding legislation and ethical changes that streamline the interaction between human beings and this technology (Davis, 2010). As a result there are a number of IT-related issues that have arisen in the recent past; some of them are discussed herein after. IT-related Issues Protecting information confidentiality certainly ranks among the most pressing IT-related issues. This relates to how an information professional or any other person who has access to privileged information should treat it and handle it to ensure it does not get into the wrong hands and become detrimental to others (Strassman, 2000). It is therefore logical that information presented as confidential should be treated as such. A lot of people are required to provide their personal information such as full names, residence, age, gender, social security number, personal identification card numbers and a lot of other private information when applying for credit cards, visas and other legal documents; if not handled with the required confidentiality this information can be used by fraudsters and impersonators to siphon cash from the unsuspecting public. An information technology professional should ensure that confidential information is handled with confidentiality. For instance, by not tapping other peoples’ phones or conducting surveillance that intrudes the privacy of others. The other issue is privacy. Traditionally, everyone is legally entitled to reasonable privacy. Under the privacy rights a person is entitled to reasonable secrecy, anonymity and solitude (Payne and Landry, 2006). Anonymity guarantees that the person is not subjected to undesired attention; secrecy ensures that personalized information is not distributed to other people who are not privy to it while solitude allows one to physically be away from other people. This has not changed even in the face of the fast changing technological environment. These days, with the closed circuit television cameras, one can gain access into another person’s private life and know every little detail of it. The dilemma arises when determining whether it is ethical and legal to do so (Davis, 2010). The determination is however not easy as the subject is complex and multifaceted and depends on the circumstances or the environment. For example, there are countries that will allow the infringement of privacy rights for the purpose of national security. At the same time there are proponents that argue that one’s’ privacy rights should never be violated for any reason. Information professionals are mandated to handle privileged information. With this privilege comes a responsibility; that of ensuring that that information does not cause harms in their way of creation, organization, dissemination and use (Jana, 1998). The ethical and moral codes governing human conduct should be observed. This information need not necessarily affect individuals directly; they may affect a country’s security or economy. A case in point is that of Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks who released classified information of different countries to the public. Assange is an informational technologist and an accomplished computer programmer. He got in possession of some sensitive information, some that directly impact on the national security of the US yet he went ahead to disseminate that information without considering the harm it could do (Burstein, 2012). IT innovation has enabled rapid dissemination of information in an easy way, one should be considerate of the harm such information could cause before broadcasting it. The last major issue is respecting other people’s intellectual property. The internet has made this tasking but necessary measures are being innovated to make sure that the creators of intellectual properties maximally benefit from them even as technology changes making it hard achieve that goal. Case study: Edward Snowden Whistle blowing Edward Snowden is a computer specialist who has made headlines in 2013 for leaking sensitive documents in his possession to the media which in turn broadcasted it to the general public. Snowden disclosed more than 200,000 classified documents on the secret surveillance of America’s security agencies on various individuals including some heads of states of other countries and other senior-ranking government officials (James, 2013). This created a public uproar in countries allied to the US who found out, through Mr. Snowden leakage, that they were under secret surveillance. Some of these countries include the UK, Brazil, Mexico, and France among others. Prior to this disclosure, Mr. Snowden was an employee in with the National Security Agencies (NAS) and later the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Snowden was a computer wizard since his childhood and was able to secure jobs in these agencies as a systems administrator and infrastructure analyst. It is during working in this capacity that he learnt of the mass surveillance programs and espionage activities conducted by the government. He also alleged that the government was using a substantial part of the funds allocated to the Department of Defense for surveillance purposes as opposed to deployment of military personnel and procurement of military facilities. Snowden confirmed that since 2006 the US expenditure on security-related activities have more than halved EU’s hitting the US $100 billion mark in 2010. This is the information that he divulged for the public good, according to his supporters (Greenwald, MacAskill and Poitras, 2013). As a result of this disclosure, Mr. Snowden was charged under criminal law for stealing government property, unauthorized use of sensitive national defense information and willful communication of that intelligence to unauthorized people. However, Mr. Snowden fled the country before that information was released and sought asylum in Russia. In his defense, Mr. Snowden pointed out that the American people had the right to know how the security operations were being carried out in the name of national security and in the process their privacy rights infringed. A critical review of this case identifies some of the professional issues that an IT professional handles. Being a systems administrator, Snowden saw how the mass surveillance by the US government was infringing the privacy rights of its citizens through cutting edge technology. The government had created programs such as PRISM that among others tracked one’s movement through the internet and even what one types in the computer, and then there was the NSA call database tracking, tapping and recording calls and Tempora, a British black-ops database (Greenwald, MacAskill and Poitras, 2013). Being in possession of such highly sensitive document Mr. Snowden did not ensure information confidentiality as required of those who have the privilege to handle that type of information. Furthermore, he did not consider the harmful consequences the disclosure will bring and lastly he used information that was not his by stealing government secrets thereby not respecting their intellectual property rights. Analysis of one of the IT-related Issue Confidentiality, harm limitation, censorship and security, accountability and privacy are major issues in the IT industries and professionals need to be guided by ethics and good mores for them to act professionally with information they are privileged to handle (Menell, 2011). However, the greatest and the trickiest issue is that of intellectual property protection. This involves copyright protection, trademark and trade secrets protection, advertising injury protection, counterfeits and patent infringement protection. The innovation of new technologies on a daily basis coupled by the increasing speed of the internet has made copyright protection a daunting task (Butakov, Dyagilev and Tskhay, 2012). A technology such as Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) 3 and 4 and Joint Pictures Expert Group (JPEG) have made sharing of music files and pictures very easy and fast. These technologies are able to compress data in a lossy format and then share them as less data files. Copyrights laws are meant to ensure that the author of a work benefits maximally from the work created. This may be in social terms where they are supposed to be acknowledged when their work is being used or in economic terms where they are entitled to benefit economically from that work for a period dictated by the laws of that country of origin of the work. If one plagiarizes a work by using it and failing to acknowledge the author then he or she is denying him his right to recognition which is a serious offense academically. Financially, the author reserves the right to benefit economically from the distribution, borrowing, translation, airing and any other use of his work that he can charge (Jolly and Fletcher, 2012). Proliferation of technology has made it harder for authors to enjoy these two rights. There is a lot of piracy that is going on and the authors barely benefit from their invention. File sharing sites and applications such as Piratebay and Bit Torrent have made protection of copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets challenging (Rustichelli, 2013). Of course there are some benefits in that the artistic creations spread faster than they used to and that the internet has eradicated the physical boundaries of markets. There is also reduced transportation and distribution costs and certainly reduced negative environmental impact (Burstein, 2012). As a result of this radical technological change some firms have started providing legal services on intellectual property that is internet based. For instance, they assist clients in preserving copyrights by determining the best way to copyright internet-based copyrightable material and determining the best trademarks so that the strategic market positioning of a product, its identity and brand are protected. This should prove to be a revelation to the business sector. However, it is clear that with the rapid changing technological environment the issue of intellectual property will gradually fade away into oblivion. Software manufacturers are quickly realizing this and most of them have started creating and distributing free open source software as opposed to copyrighted closed softwares with restrictive licenses (Menell, 2011). Conclusion Information is power. Today’s world is knowledge-driven and each one is looking for that information so as to make better decisions or to gain a competitive advantage over rivals. The IT industry is fast changing yet the methods of providing the information are static (Davis, 2010). Issues are therefore raised over how the technology affects the creation, organization, dissemination and use of information. The major issues still to be addressed by this changing technology are those of privacy, harm limitation, confidentiality and intellectual property protection. The IT professionals are finding it hard to maintain the standards that were maintained on these issues before the infosphere started experiencing rapid changes. It is now evident that some of these ethical issues will have to be scrapped out for failing to keep pace with the rapid-changing IT industry (Menell, 2011). References Burstein, M., 2012. Exchanging Information without Intellectual Property. Texas Law Review, 91(2), pp.227-282. Butakov, S., Dyagilev, V., and Tskhay, A., 2012. Protecting Students’ Intellectual Property in the Web plagiarism detection process. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 13(5), pp.1-19. Davis, K., 2010. A Research Update from the information study group at QUT. inCite, 31(6), pp.14. Greenwald, G., MacAskill, E., and Poitras, L., 2013. Edward Snowden: The whistleblower behind NSA surveillance revelations. The Guardian, Available at: < http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance> [Accessed 28th November 2013] James, N., 2013. NSA Terror over ‘doomsday’ cache of secrets stashed in online cloud by Edward Snowden. Mail Online, Available at: < http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2514095/NSA-terror-Edward-Snowdens-doomsday-cache-secrets.html > [Accessed 29th November 2013]. Jana, R., 1998. Facing Ethical Dilemmas. InfoWorld, 20(52), pp.73. Jolly, M., and Fletcher, A., 2012. Ten Simple rules to protect your Intellectual property. PLS Computational Biology, 8(11), pp.1-4. Menell, P., 2011. Governance of intellectual Resources and Disintegration of Intellectual Property in the Digital Age. Technology Law Journal, 26(4), pp.1523-1559. Payne, D., and Landry, B., 2006. A uniform code of Ethics: Business and IT professional Ethics. Communications of the ACM, 49(11), pp. 81-84. Rustichelli, A., 2013. Intellectual Property and Information Technology and Communication. Backer and McKenzie, Available at: < http://www.bakermckenzie.com/Luxembourg/IntellectualPropertyInformationTechnology/ > [Accessed 28th November 2013] Strassman, P., 2000. Practice Ethical IT. Computer world, 34(14), pp.40. Appendix Appendix 1: Profile of Edward Snowden Appendix 2 US Department of Defense Expenditure in comparison with EU Appendix 3 Read More