6.7 Ethics

Internet RFC 1087 [9], "Ethics and the Internet," may have been the first document to address ethical behavior for access to and use of the Internet. It stated that such access and use is a privilege that should be treated as such by all users. An excerpt from the RFC follows :

The IAB strongly endorses the view of the Division Advisory Panel of the National Science Foundation Division of Network, Communications Research and Infrastructure which, in paraphrase , characterized as unethical and unacceptable any activity which purposely: (a) seeks to gain unauthorized access to the resources of the Internet, (b) disrupts the intended use of the Internet, (c) wastes resources (people, capacity, computer) through such actions, (d) destroys the integrity of computer-based information, and/or (e) compromises the privacy of users. The Internet exists in the general research milieu. Portions of it continue to be used to support research and experimentation on networking. Because experimentation on the Internet has the potential to affect all of its components and users, researchers have the responsibility to exercise great caution in the conduct of their work. Negligence in the conduct of Internet-wide experiments is both irresponsible and unacceptable. The IAB plans to take whatever actions it can, in concert with Federal agencies and other interested parties, to identify and to set up technical and procedural mechanisms to make the Internet more resistant to disruption. Such security, however, may be extremely expensive and may be counterproductive if it inhibits the free flow of information which makes the Internet so valuable . In the final analysis, the health and well-being of the Internet is the responsibility of its users who must, uniformly, guard against abuses which disrupt the system and threaten its long- term viability.

Since the wide acceptance and use of the Internet, the blending of technologies has made it a bit harder to distinguish the research-based Internet of 1989 from the intra/extra/Internet businesses use today. With such evolved networks come evolved ideas of how to behave. In the next section, we extend the security realm to coverage of wireless issues and discuss the ramifications of setting up wireless LANs in your business environment.