New course: Fall 2024!
In fall 2024, I will teach Cybersecurity in Context in the Legal Studies program (LS 190). The course will be based on my new textbook with Golden G. Richard III.
Course Description
Cybersecurity has become instrumental to economic activity and human rights alike. But as digital technologies penetrate almost every aspect of human experience, a broad range of socialpolitical-economic-legal-ethical-military and other considerations have come to envelop the cybersecurity landscape.
Cybersecurity in Context (CiC) explores the most important elements that shape the playing field on which cybersecurity problems emerge and are managed. The course will emphasize how ethical, legal, and economic frameworks enable and constrain security technologies and policies. It will introduce some of the most important macro-elements (such as national security considerations and the interests of nation-states) and micro-elements (such as behavioral economic insights into how people understand and interact with security features). Specific topics include policymaking (on the national, international, and organizational level), business models, legal frameworks (including duties of security, privacy issues, law enforcement access issues, computer hacking, and economic/military espionage), standards making, and the roles of users, government, and industry.
CiC includes a computer major lab component designed to upskill students and expose them to the actual technologies and methods of computer attack, because in order to understand defense, one must be familiar with offense. Lab activities will be accompanied by ethics and legal modules, along with a pledge to refrain from using these techniques for malign purposes.
There are no prerequisites for this course and it is not necessary to have programming or other advanced computer skills.