Itec 4205 - Privacy and Cyber Security

ITEC 4205

Research Paper

Privacy and Cyber Security

As Americans, citizens of one of the greatest countries in the world, many of us take our freedoms for granted, particularly our rights to privacy and security. In our lifetime, we have never known oppression like citizens of other countries such as China, Russia, or North Korea. Consider Americans’ right to privacy. The main reason our Forefathers penned the Bill of Rights - and the Fourth Amendment specifically - was to escape the tyranny of the British government and their Writs of Assistance. Writs that were essentially all-encompassing search warrants obtained from officials in an effort to search for smuggled goods without probable cause. And it worked. Early American colonists had no rights to question the writs or that officers lacked proper cause or evidence to serve them. Today, we enjoy the freedoms of speech, expression, and privacy, along with many other rights. As America’s population has continued to grow, and technology has advanced far beyond what our Forefathers could have ever imagined, many freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights have become a double-edged sword. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on the right to privacy, how security is important to protect that right, and the legal and ethical issues surrounding privacy and cyber security.

Defining privacy has increasingly become a difficult task. The Fourth Amendment defines privacy in terms of persons being safe in their homes, without having to worry about searches of their property or the government rifling through their personal documents without probable cause. In short, it speaks almost exclusively of illegal search and seizure of homes and property. In Colonial times, this was the privacy concern that most people had – was the British government sending officers to search your home and personal papers to look for traces of smuggling or other illegal activity? In current times, we most certainly cannot relate to this specific concern, so how does the Fourth Amendment translate to the 21st century?

In 2016, privacy concerns are much more complex. We still need protection from improper search and seizure, but we also have much more elaborate property to search and potentially be seized. Electronic devices of all types – computers, mp3 players, smartphones, health trackers and the like – are fixtures of our everyday lives. These devices make our busy lives more manageable, easier to keep track of appointments and emails and the myriad of to-do (and honey-do) lists we all seem to amass. We surf the Internet daily, several times a day even, and sometimes for hours on end. Searching for news stories, buzzing through social media posts, shopping, banking, playing video games, browsing dating sites, conducting research for scholarly purposes – whatever your heart or mind desires – you can find it online. Persons who wish to download nefarious content such as bomb plans for criminal intent or child pornography have even done so with the same sense of privacy or anonymity that law-abiding citizens are downloading e-books. As far as seizures of property goes, both would also suffer the same inconveniences when their possessions are seized. Those under suspicion, whether rightfully or not, are without access to their beloved technological devices while under investigation, and with little recourse for the device’s safe or timely return (Smith 2016). We also assume that being what was once our Forefathers’ private papers are now our private computer files, the computer files are more private or unreachable than documents printed and lying on our desk. The fact that they are hidden in an intricately designed file system does not offer the files more protection from search or seizure.

In fact, official seizure of documents or devices is not the biggest threat – seizure of our personal data from people outside of law enforcement are. Think about how many sites you visit in a day. As a student who also works a full-time job in the Information Technology field, I am constantly on the Internet. From working on a computer all day for my job, to coming home and researching topics for class discussions or paying utility bills, I can spend 12 or more hours per day online. Many of the sites I visit collect at least a miniscule amount of personal data about the user of the site, such as your name, email address and a password, while others may collect banking or credit card information, social security number, and mother’s maiden name in addition to email address, name and password. With 5 billion devices projected to be connected to the Internet within the next four years (Britton, 2016), and the massive amounts of data being shared and stored and gathered, our need to protect our private data is far greater than the needs of our Forefathers.

Enter the age of cyber security. Cyber security is the protection of information and data stored on computers or via the Internet. Obviously, it is much more involved than installing a lock on a door or window, or following an established law. Today’s cyber security measures must be tackled from multiple facets. The most obvious facet is our personal security – installing virus protection on our home computers, activating personal computer firewalls and malware detection applications – which is necessary to protect us from known threats. Known threats are the threats that have been identified, and a course of action such as closing a software vulnerability with a security patch or update has diffused the threat, but what about unknown threats - like the key logger hidden in that file you downloaded last week, the one that has been keeping track of all your keystrokes? Or the attachment you accidentally clicked on from an email you thought was from a colleague? Now your identity could be compromised from the person tracking credit card information entered through the key logger or your files are now locked and being held for ransom. A huge part of personal data security is user education. Taking a little extra time to review the sender’s email address for abnormalities and only downloading files from trusted sources will go a long way in protecting yourself from most personal computer threats.

Other initiatives are in place for consumers to report Cyber-crime. The Internet Crime Complaint Center, also known as IC3, was founded in 2000 (IC3, N.D.). The Internet Crime Complaint Center allows the public to report internet crimes via their webpage. Examples of crimes that can be reported are phishing scams, computer hacking and get-rich-quick schemes. Another agency is the National White Collar Crime Center, also known as NW3C, which provides training to