Ethics in the Age of Cyber Crime and Cyber War

Abstract

We have been given new challenges by the “Information Age”. In the virtual world of cyber crime, cyber warfare and Big Brother, where the power of formal law is doubtful, where club law dominates, where we has had not enough time to develop well-established formal and informal rules yet, one of our greatest challenge is to form the new rules for the new world or, better to say, for ourselves. I have been collecting ICT related news for a long time. In this paper I provide a set of problematic fields and questions. These questions should be answered by ourselves, the sooner the better. It depends on us now whether we can form the new world of well-established rules, both written and unwritten, based on eternal human values – or the one in which human values will not play, a world without civilisation and culture. Now it is time to decide what kind of a basis the ethics of this new world will have, or whether it will have any ethics at all.