Greetings, welcome to the International Cyber Conflicts course. Thank you all for participating in this course. We have students in this course from all around the world including the United States, India, Russia, China. This course is designed for discussing international cyber conflicts that have grown and intensified over the course of time, especially since 2000.
As the Internet becomes inextricably integrated into the society, both for social interaction and business transactions, the stakes are getting higher for ensuring the continuity for the internet in its current form. However, the forces against it are attempting to split it and fragment it into pieces. There are two fundamental issues that make solving international conflicts difficult. The first, there is anonymity on the Internet and identities can be spoofed. Which means that people can hide behind the group of anonymity and commit crimes and other negative activities without revealing themselves to others.
The second issue is that the Internet transcends national boundaries where as the laws are applicable within national boundaries and the Internet is across boundaries so somebody in China could be doing interaction with somebody in the United States. That makes enforcement of laws very difficult.
So the citizens in one country can launch attacks while the victims can be citizens of another country making jurisdiction very difficult. The stakes are very high, countries are also jockeying to gain a strategic leverage on the Internet, both politically through treaties as well as through surveillance and intelligence gathering.
And concerned by the impact that free flow of information can impact political stability, a lot of countries have started viewing Internet as a threat. Threat to the political order, threat to the society. And they have been propagating censorship and separation of the Internet.
And the countries which feel that the information should be freely flowing on the Internet while other countries are opposing that in all international forums.
Not only that, there are several international conflicts associated with the Internet. On a wide range of issues including governance of the Internet, cyber warfare, the censorship of information, and espionage. Remember, as these stakes on the Internet are growing, so are the concerns that the countries have.
Internet has become a sphere of strategic warfare among countries that is figuring prominently in the military strategies, and companies are investing billions. On all of them is really driven by the increased dependence on the Internet, from controlling our armed forces, to trade, e-commerce, social communication. Everything relies on the Internet. We are in In some ways dependent on the Internet today.
According to Forrester, the B2B commerce has exceeded $550 billion, and business-to-consumer commerce has already exceeded $250 billion. That's a huge amount of business transaction, and critical infrastructure is becoming increasingly dependent on the Internet. Now we have this smart grid, where we have our power grid on which we have an overlaid information technology grid. Which means that anybody who can break into the communication grid on the smart grid, will be able to disrupt the power supply on the country around the world. And now we are looking at connected vehicles, where we have vehicles communicating with each other both for collision avoidance and for communication.
So, given the increased dependence, we need to be very careful and cautious in how we address some of these issues.
So this class starts with the basic overview of information security and then is split into multiple teams. You know, we discussed a conflicts that arrive among nations related to cyber threats including cyber crime, cyber warfare, information censorship, media piracy, cyber espionage, critical infrastructure threat, and the control of the Internet.
And then we go on to discuss efforts to improve cooperation among nations in cyber security, including treaties, confidence building measures, regional cooperation, the role of transnational bodies, such as the UN and the OSCE.
And finally, we begin to understand the psychological factors in the cyber conflicts. Both, at an individual level and at international level. What is it that is prompting is that still the existence of the Cold War or the remnants of the Cold War that are coming through or are the new conflicts that are arriving in the modern age.
And as we try to resolve some of these disputes on the internet, we need to start looking at the impediments that we have. And, for instance, if your looking at critical infrastructure threats, we need to find out who the enemies are, what their motivations are, and where they need to go next.
And the course will deal all of the conflicts that we talked about including internet governance, cyber warfare, critical infrastructure, cyber espionage and the applicability of law that an international level including the law upon conflict.
A key thing that is happening today Is that we're working on confidence-building measures in a lot of transnational bodies. We know that treaties are difficult so we are taking a step back and trying to build confidence before we go on to build treaties. And we are aiming for regional cooperation rather than having cooperation across the entire board, across the entire world.
There are other related area that we will cover in this course as well, including copyright protection and the terrorist's use of the Internet.
These are both important an they are being exploited in some countries for leverage against other countries.
In topics such as these there is no right or wrong answer. They all depend on the perspective of the person analyzing them. So the goal of this class is going to be to explain the issues and create a free and fair discussion on the class participance. A moderated blog has been set up for class discussions to encourage student to discuss the issues. We hope that the issues will elicit a passionate debate amongst students, especially across different countries where opinions have been shaped based on norms and societal expectations.
For instance, in some countries, it is okay to have some censorship but in other countries it's enigma to have censorship on the internet or anywhere else.
And this course is designed for supporting a very large number of students literally hundreds of students across the world. And each class will have material online for students to absorb including short recorded segments form the instructors.
Each class will also have recordings that accompany the lectures that the students are expected to read ahead of class.
The class is available to any student to take and students who need to get credit for the class will need to register for the class at the University at Albany State University of New York. Which has developed this class for a wide audience.
For students who are taking this class for credit there will be assessments exclusively for those students. And the students who are not taking this for credit will not be allowed to take these assessments. Each lecture will have about four modules with 10 to 15 minutes of instructor video, and the rest of the material will be readings, cases and quizzes putting into the topic of the class.
Students will be able to post questions for the instructor or other students in the class. And we hope that given the large number of students, a lot of the questions will be addressed by the students by answering each other.
There are multiple issues that we talk about here including the evolution of cyber crime. Where did it start and where it is headed, the types of cyber crime that we have today, the actors and the motivations of cyber crime.
And then what are the efforts in solving cyber crime including the laws that we have on cyber crime. And then we talk about some international issues in cyber crime that we have to resolve. And each of this again will be 10-15 minutes of instructor presentation and then associated readings. Students are expected to listen to the lectures, study from the readings, and then work on the international cyber crime case as part of the overall learning for this specific lecture.
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