Course Overview

This course explores legal, ethical, and policy dimensions of privacy, technology, legal, and security issues. While concerned mainly with information technology, these issues extend to personal, societal, cultural and other aspects of existence in a modern technological society.

Because of the diverse nature of privacy and security issues, this course is team taught by an attorney and an information security professional. The course will address questions concerning what current legislation governs privacy and security in the U.S., what ethical and value considerations are relevant to current and projected laws, and how policy is formulated in response to legal, moral, and practical constraints within a modern, technological, and global economic environment.

 

Course Objectives

Primary Objective

Students will gain an understanding of the range and breadth of ethical, policy, and legal issues related to technology, particularly information technology.

In addition, students will explore approaches to analyzing and addressing these ethical, policy, and legal issues.

Supporting Objectives

  1. Students will learn and apply ethics to social issues from three perspectives:  professional ethics, philosophical ethics, and descriptive ethics

  2. Students will gain an understanding of the basic legal framework supporting cyber technologies

  3. Students will examine information technology and related technologies, particularly technologies of the past 10 years and those currently emerging

  4. Students will apply the legal and ethical frameworks described above to the impact of recent and emerging technologies on social policy, both in the United States and globally

  5. Students will particularly explore the issue of privacy in today's technological environment, both in the United States and in other cultures