Information Assurance & Security Ethics in Complex Systems:  Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Principal Investigator: Melissa Dark

Information assurance and security is inherently normative, dealing with complex social and ethical issues such as privacy, access, ownership, and liability, reliability and safety. For example, questions such as “What ought this system do in order to preserve privacy?” and “To whom should access be granted?” are at the core of information assurance and security. Norms, an integral part of human life, vary greatly among peoples and cultures and are regulated through social structures such as policy and economics. A primary goal of this work is to illuminate how ethical issues in information assurance and security are technical, economic, political and cultural in nature. Using each disciplinary perspective as a framework for considering the various information assurance and security issues, it recognizes how ethical issues in information security evolve and co-evolve in the current technical, economic, political and cultural milieu. This work uniquely takes a system-of-systems approach to investigating ethical and social issues in information assurance and security. The output will be a book, the landscape of which coheres to demonstrate information assurance and security ethical issues in their complexity.

Personnel

  • Brandon Sorge
  • George Bailey

Keywords: information assurance, security, ethics