CSC 300 Professional Responsibilities
Assignment 2: Encryption Scenarios
In this assignment, you need to discuss two possible scenarios
related to the use of encryption, and the potential social,
ethical and professional implications.
One scenario should illustrate the perspective of law enforcement
agencies, whose interests include the investigation of electronic
communication related to crime and terrorism, for example.
The other scenario should demonstrate the interest of individuals
to keep their electronic communication private, and how encryption
can be used to achieve this.
Try to identify realistic scenarios that are reasonably plausible,
rather than highly hypothetical ones that are unlikely to occur
in the "real world".
Finally, you need to state your opinion
on how to balance these and possibly additional requirements
(e.g. commercial interests).
Similar to the first assignment, the length of this essay should
be around 500 - 1000 words.
Structure
I suggest the following structure for this essay:
Title, author, affiliation (e.g. institution, class), date
Introduction and background (what is the problem or controversy)
Social or ethical issues (what are the core aspects)
Perspectives (identify and describe the different viewpoints
in a balanced way)
Scenarios (describe two different scenarios that illustrate
the perspectives of law enforcement and individuals, respectively)
Evaluation (express your personal opinion or preferences)
Conclusions (review the most important aspects)
Bibliography (list the sources you've used)
The main focus of the paper should be a fair and balanced presentation
of the relevant issues, a brief description of the two scenarios,
and an evaluation and conclusions that reflect your own personal view
of the issues. It should not be a manifest for one particular viewpoint,
or an attack of a viewpoint you may not like or disagree with.
This does not mean that you're personal opinions are of no interest;
however, they should be given within a context that provides
a reasonably impartial overview of the critical issues.
Citations and Bibliography
There are many different ways to cite sources in a paper like this,
but a few general principles apply. The basic idea is to acknowledge
the sources for those statements that are not based on your own work
and ideas. In our discipline, by far the most common way is to
list the references to the sources used at the end of the paper
in a Bibliography section, and provide pointers in the text
to sources that are relevant for a specific statement, sentence,
or paragraph.
As an example, let's assume that you're writing a paragraph
on cryptography and law enforcement, and you're paraphrasing
some technical information from the textbook we're using.
Then you would provide a citation like this one [Baase, 2003]
(or as a hyperlink [Baase, 2003])
in the text, which indicates to the reader
that the detailed information on that particular source
can be found under that listing in the biblography.
The bibliography section then must contain
an entry like this:
Baase, Sara. A Gift of Fire, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 2003.
Each citation in your text must have a corresponding entry in the
bibliography, and each entry in the bibliography should be cited
in the text. Sometimes people also add sources of general interest
to the bibliography without citing them explicitly in the text;
the number of such entries should be limited, however.
The details for the format of citations differ between publications.
I suggest to follow the one used by ACM publications; you can
find more details at the ACM Crossroads site
http://www.acm.org/crossroads/doc/information/wg/citations.html
Plagiarism and Use of Other Sources
While it is acceptable to rely on work and ideas from other sources,
you must acknowledge the sources you used.
In general, you should put everything in your own words.
If you feel that the exact wording of a statement is very
important, you can do that for short segments (not more than
a few sentences) that are visually identified as direct
quotations (e.g. through quotation marks, a different font, or
indentation). It is not acceptable to simply copy and paste material.
The formal Cal Poly policy on plagiarism can be found in the
Cal Poly Campus Administrative Manual, Section 684.
Grading Guidelines
This paper contributes 20 points to the overall assignments score.
I will grade your essay based on the following criteria;
they are similar to the
evaluation criteria
for the term paper and the accompanying presentation.
knowledge of subject matter
(does the author demonstrate a good grasp of the topic)
relevance of the topic
(is the topic of interest within this course)
evidence
(does the author present facts, examples, or other material
that supports the arguments, and are the sources cited)
accuracy
(is the material presented correct, consistent, and complete)
organization
(is the paper well organized and easy to follow)
presentation
(is the appearence of the paper of professional quality,
e.g. without spelling or grammatical errors)
You should not worry about what you think my personal opinion
about the respective topics might be. I will judge the papers
on the aspects above, and not on their agreement with my
particular views.
Submission
The deadline for this assignment is 11:59 pm on Wednesday, January 29, 2003.
It should be submitted via the Blackboard "Discussion Forum"
feature; I will set up a specific discussion forum
"Assignment 2" for it. Create a new thread for your
submission with a meaningful subject line; the title of
your paper is much more informative than "Assignment 2"
or "My second homework."
You should format your document as an HTML file
so that it can be viewed easily from within BlackBoard.
If you use MS Word or a similar program, please
convert it to HTML.
Please note that submissions to the discussion forum are accessible
to all participants in the class. I am doing this on purpose
so that students can find out what topics other students find interesting.
This may also present an ethical problem: Some may be tempted
to get inspiration or more from material already submitted. You can minimize
potential problems by submitting your assignment only a short time
before the deadline. And of course I am assuming that all the participants
in this class behave in an ethical and professional manner.