Information Technology and the Philosophy of Ethics: Material and Transcendental Approaches

It was Martin Heidegger who claimed that ''the essence of technology is nothing technological."' There is a close relationship between technology and society and the task of ethics is to disclose the assumptions, values, and interests in the ongoing interplay between the two. Let us examine the recent case of Hewlett-Packard, a global technology company that was ranked as the second-best "corporate citizen7' by Business Ethics Magazine in the spring of 2006. This is a company whose ethics have gone awry. The story begins in early 2005 when then-CEO Carly Fiorina resigned from HP as a result of disagreement among the' leadership over the future direction of the company. In the period preceding this decision, certain details of private board meetings ended up being leaked to the media. With new leadership at the helm, there was a strong drive to identify the board member responsible for the leaks; HP did not want details of its company strategy being made public. Personal interviews with individual board members proved inconclusive, and the leaks continued. Senior HP managers then came up with a multi-pronged spying program to identify the source of media leaks, focused on both board members and journalists. A technique known as "pretexting" was vital to the investigation. Pretexting, to put it plainly, is another word for lying, although in most cases it is not technically illegal. Using this approach, an individual misrepresents him or herself as another with the purpose of obtaining private information. As an example, the investigator impersonating a board member might call the phone company, claim to have misplaced his most recent phone bill, and ask that a copy be faxed to theaumber he provided. Personal surveillance methods were also used; one journalist and her family were followed all the way to Disneyland on vacation. HP attempted to install tracing software on journalists' computers through the use of corrupted email attachments. They fabricated news releases and "leaked" them to suspected journalists to see what would happen with the story. There was even talk of hiring "moles" to plant in newsrooms.