ASSIGNMENT 1

ITE302x
THE SCANDAL OF HP’S INTERNAL INVESTIGATION

I. THE SCANDAL IN SUMARY

HP’s director suspected that there’s someone has leaked its top-secret information to the
public. After various efforts without a single success, the director had decided to hire a
private investigation company with an illegal approach: pretexting, which is politically
banned by US law, and morally wrong in US social standard. At the end of the investigation,
the finally found the person who leaked the information. In summary, to the extent of
ethics, HP’s director decision was categorical wrong, but to the consequentialist, the
decision was correct
II. RIGHT OR WRONG IN DIIFERENT APPROACHES
Evaluating the problem as right or wrong is depend on each’s different approaches:
- Utilitarianism: To this approach, the decision was correct, as it eliminates the
information leak, thus brings the benefit to the whole corporation
- Equality: To this approach, the decision was wrong, as it is injustice to the person who
being investigated
- Common Good: To this approach, the decision was wrong, as it violate the privacy of a
citizen, then if a citizen’s privacy is violated, a community of citizen’s privacy may e
violate
- Virtue: The decision was wrong, as violating personal privacy is unacceptable in any
community
- Human right: The decision was wrong, as it violate another’s privacy and another’s
decision to reveal his information
III. PERSONAL EVALUATION
1. The tactics used to investigate the leak was more serious and disconcerting, base on
the following point:
- The decision was categorically wrong, privacy is one of the fundamental rights of a
person, which cannot be violated in any circumstance. Confucius says, if you do not
want something happen to you, do not do it to another. We absolutely do not want our
privacy to be violated, so do not support violating another’s privacy
- Privacy is also protected be the law. The law defines a baseline so that keep the society
stable and innovating, so the law cannot be violated in any circumstance
- The director is a consequentialist. The decision is just like the example in the second
lesion video, about the doctor has to decide if he can murder a people to take his organs
to save the five. Although there’re reasons for this decision, this is widely unaccepted
2. Using of pretexting should never be justified, and under no circumstance should be
legal
Pretexting has been forbidden in law, so obliviously it is illegal under any circumstance.
This action is should also never be justified, because, to each of us, privacy violation is a
big issue, and we never want to happen to us, to do the person who investigated, and so
do every people in this society. In my opinion, wrong action is always wrong, to matter
what reason it brings. A very famous example is about FBI investigating a murder, all
they have is his iPhone and they need to unlock it to find more information. FBI could
have hired an illegal hacker to quickly unlock it and grab the information, but his action
is categorically wrong, and they decided not to take this option, instead, they first
require Apple to unlock it for them, but Apple think that is they unlock the murder’s
iPhone for the FBI, it will also be categorically wrong to their customer, so they refused.
After that, FBO spent nearly a year to unlock the iPhone legally