ICS: Written Homework: US Cybersecurity Policy

Go up to the ICS HW page (md)

You will want to see the homeworks policies page (md) for formatting and other details. The due dates are listed on the UVa course page (md).

Assignment

You will need to be familiar with the content of the US Cybersecurity Policy slide set.

For this assignment, you are to write an essay on the following topic:

What would you suggest to do to improve US cybersecurity policy?

You may make any assumptions that are viable. Examples include actions that are taken by the president, a member of congress, etc. You may not make unreasonable assumptions (“the parties in congress will work together without lobbyist influence and pass a bill that works!”). However, please state any assumptions that you are making.

Your actions don’t need to fix it in one fell swoop – it may well be that your actions make a marked improvement, but do not completely fix it. You will need to cite some evidence that your proposal will make some positive change. This can be references (online or other, but they need to be accessible to us for the grading) or explanation of how/why your proposal will have an effect.

The essay must be 500 words or less. That’s about 1 page worth of content. We are more interested in quality rather than quantity, so we aren’t going to grade it based on length. Note that any header information (name, title, date, class, etc.) do not count toward the word limit. References, if you use any, also do not count against this limit. If it is over 500 words, then we will not grade it and give you a zero! The HW policies page (md) discusses this in a bit more detail.

In addition to the viable assumptions from above, we are looking for a well thought out policy changes that are reasonable. So stating that Congress should pass a law to force everybody to use high levels of encryption (for example) is not reasonable in the current political climate. Nor are presidential executive orders that exceed the authority vested in said orders. We can tell if you are just giving us a load of BS, and we will give you a zero if you do that.

Did you read the section about fluff in the homeworks policies page (md)? When one is grading dozens of these assignments, one becomes a great fluff detector, and will mark your assignment down – or give you a zero – for it. It’s a waste of your time and also a waste of our time.

Submission

Please ensure that you follow all four of these requirements:

  1. You will submit a PDF file of your essay.
  2. Please put your word count at the top of your essay. As mentioned above, any header info (name, class, date, title, etc.), as well as references, do not count toward this word count. And the required text “499 words” doesn’t count, either, of course (replace 499 with your actual word count).
  3. Is your essay it 500 words or less? If not, you are going to get a zero!
  4. You MUST name your file userid.pdf where ‘userid’ is your UVa userid.