Cyber Law and International Perspectives on Cyberspace

Overview

Every serious cyber decision eventually becomes a legal one. Whether you can monitor a network, what you must disclose and to whom, which country's law reaches a server, and what counts as an act of war when nobody crosses a border, these aren't edge cases. They are the questions that stop an incident response at 2 am, and most technical staff have never been taught how to think about them.

This certificate covers that ground twice over, from the inside and from above.

The first course works through the federal statutory, common, and international law that an information technology professional actually encounters criminal, civil, regulatory and international. The emphasis is on competence rather than trivia: reading a statute or an opinion, interpreting it, applying it to a real situation, and understanding how public policy shapes what the law becomes next.

The second course moves to the state level. It begins with the technical nature of the internet and then examines the threats facing nations who the threat actors are, what they want, what they are capable of before working through the practical difficulty of monitoring activity in cyberspace, domestic and international policy, the prospects for cooperation, cyber deterrence, and the concept of cyberwar as state and non-state actors are actually practising it.

Norwich teaches this as an institution designated by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense, and the certificate is one of the nine published concentrations of the university's Master of Science in Cybersecurity.

What you will learn

By the end of the certificate you will be able to:

• Read, interpret and apply legal authorities; statutes, regulations and case law, to a situation in front of you
• Identify which bodies of law reach a given cyber incident: criminal, civil, regulatory, common law, international
• Anticipate how public policy pressure is likely to shape the law in an area that is still forming
• Explain the threats facing nations in cyberspace, and distinguish threat actors by motivation, capability and intent
• Account for the technical reasons monitoring activity in cyberspace is hard, and what that means for attribution and policy
• Compare domestic and international policy approaches, and assess where cooperation between states is realistic
• Reason about cyber deterrence and cyberwar as they are actually practised by state and non-state actors
• Produce a case study applying all of it to a real problem