Questions and Books

1. How much should government regulate cryptography?  In particular, how much should they regulate academic research in forming codes and doing cryptanalysis?  How about publication of that research, in both academic and more public settings?  Also, how much should government regulate the use of cryptosystems to communicate via mail, email, telephones, etc.?
   There are two books related to this:  Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Stephen Levy and Chatter: Dispatches from the World of Global Eavesdropping by Patrick Keefe.
   
2. How much personal information can citizens keep private from the government? Another way of asking this question is what kinds and how much information about citizens should various governmental agencies be able to access?  What should be the rights of individual citizens to know about governmental access of their information? 
   Three books relate to both this question and the next one:  The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose between Privacy and Freedom?, by David Brin, The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age by Daniel Solove, and No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society, by  Robert O'Harrow.
   
3. How much personal information should businesses have?  Who owns the information about individual people?  Who controls it?  Who should?
4. How much privacy should we be willing to give up in exchange for security? 
   Any of the books  above are relevant to this question as is Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier.
   

Reading Journals

Each week, you should read a reasonable part of your book  so that you will be done reading it by the end of October. You should keep a  journal  on your reading. Each entry should describe what you think are the most important points that the author made, why you think they're important, and how they relate to any of the four questions above.  Journal entries should be between one and three pages long and will be collected every week.

Paper
Starting in late October you will form a group of four students whose job is to research information relevant to your question,  come up two or more different positions on the topic, and write  papers that argue  for each  of these positions.   One way to do this is to imagine that you are one of the players in the question.  For example, in the first question, you could take the side of the government or NSA or you could take the side of the cryptography researchers.  In the third, you could be on the side of businesses such as Acxiom or ChoicePoint or on the side of the consumer.  

Each group should turn in at least two papers, one for each position.  All the members of the group should participate in the writing of each of the papers and the project will get just one grade. When you finish your projects (papers and presentations) each of you will be asked to evaluate how well the members of your group shared the work.  This evaluation will help determine what grade the individual students get.  In my experience most  students share the work equally and they each get the same grade, the one for the whole project.

Your papers should be polished and edited for both content and style.  Papers should be well organized and coherently argued.   In your introduction, you should state what you are going to argue in a clearly articulated thesis sentence.  Each of the paragraphs following from there should support your thesis by providing evidence and argument to support your claims.  Each substantive point should follow clearly and logically from the previous point.    Also, you should be careful to avoid  introducing extraneous information that serves only to confuse.    (Thanks to Alisa Rosenthal for letting me copy from her essay assignments.)

Papers should be typed, with the pages numbered and stapled together.  They should be between 3-5 pages long and must include a signed copy of the Gustavus Honor Code on a separate piece of paper.

You should cite textual evidence where appropriate and provide proper citations for your quotes and paraphrases.  Any standardized citation format is is acceptable.  If you do not have a preferred citation method, two good ones to become familiar with are the MLA style and the APA style (see your writing handbook).

Presentation/ Class Discussion
After Thanksgiving, each group will  present their research to the class and lead discussion on their topic.  One way to do this is to have one person in the group present background information and expand on the question.  Two or more people should do a panel discussion (or debate) that  presents the separate positions the group decided to take.  Then the fourth person could then lead the discussion on the topic. 

Some suggestions on working in groups

Working in groups like this can be more work than you might expect.  Your group should be sure to meet early and often.  You should clearly articulate what the individual members of the group are expected to do in order to prepare for each meeting and what they should do at each meeting.  If you have questions or problems, be sure to ask me for help.