The Twitter Hack and a need for teaching tech ethics

    Maybe I'm a little late on commenting about the Twitter stuff, but I wanted to write down some thoughts about it. The main thing I'm concerned with is giving kids/teens a place to explore their interest in technology with appropriate guidance. The teens and young adults responsible for the hack on Twitter weren't overwhelmingly skilled with technology, but it's clear they were willing to learn what they needed. That type of self taught technical ability needs to be recognized and put into constructive learning. That constructive learning needs to include time to discuss the legal and ethical implications of technology and hacking.

    I count myself as lucky to have grown up with a computer (and eventually several) in my house. I think I broke the computer hundreds of times, and most of the time I didn't need (a lot) of help from my dad to fix it. But even with that, as my skills developed, there was little advice or guidance on ethics in technology. My parents taught me not trespass on others property, and definitely not to steal. But the ethics lessons were generally for the physical world.

    It's rare to hear ethics lessons include examples from technology. And for kids who get into technology young, you learn that the constraints on you are generally what you can accomplish in a UI. If nothing stops you, it feels like you couldn't be doing something wrong, at least not on the computer. And sure, you break the computer and have to reinstall Windows a few times, but you typically learn your way around that sort of stuff. Unfortunately, what you learn messing around on your home computer and network teaches a false lesson. 

    I don't remember anyone telling me that it was a serious crime to access a network that doesn't belong to you. Cryptocurrency didn't exist yet, so definitely no one told me anything with respect to that. I pride myself on my sense of right and wrong, but the computer stuff is fuzzy, especially in your teens, when everything seems fuzzy. In no way am I defending the actions of these teens, but without good guidance on tech ethics, it's easy to see them getting started, and things escalating from there. How do I know? Well once upon a time, a couple friends and I worked on a bitcoin tumbler. We ran into some roadblocks in creating it, and decided that it was probably illegal, so we left it be. But had we not run into those roadblocks? Maybe we wouldn't have been so lucky.

    My point is, technology should be a part of every ethics discussion. We live too much of our lives online to ignore the ethics implications of computers. As part of my Engineering education, we regularly talked about ethics, since it's an ABET requirement. But that shouldn't be the first time we talk about ethics in technology and what you create. I have a lot of hope that things will improve as we all get used to the rapid change of our digital world. Until then, I hope teens who love technology get the guidance they need to avoid wrongdoing and legal trouble.