The Department of Homeland Security is interested in using computers to identify suspected of money laundering operations within the United States. It would like to mine databases containing information about purchases and travel to detect patterns that may identify individuals who are engaged in, or at least planning, money laundering activity. It asks a panel of information security professionals to determine the feasibility of this project. A panel members say the most difficult problem will be determining what patterns of transactions to look for. As a panel member you suggest that it might be possible to construct a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to mimic money laundering activity. The program would determine the transactions needed to execute money laundering act. Once these transactions were determined, it would be possible to search databases resources to find evidence of these transactions. However, the major draw back is that there would be no way to narrow the scope of investigation to a few potential money laundering individuals and in fact a large population of individuals would needs to be searched potentially violated many individual’s privacy.
As a information security professional assigned to this project, what would be the ethical and moral issues, from your perspective, of developing a computer program capable of violating a large population of individuals’ privacy in order to identify and potentially catch a few suspected individuals of money laundering? How does this play into what we learned in this course about the issues related to violating an individual’s privacy? What about the greater good for society by catching these money laundering individuals?
Your paper should be about 4 to 6 pages long (not including the title page and the reference page). References must be listed and cited in APA format. The final paper may be subjected to checking against plagiarism (turnitin.com) by the Instructor.
