Independent Paper

Students enrolled in COMPSCI 591L will be expected to submit a significant, independently-written paper analyzing the application of computer crime law to a state-of-the-art system.

Overview

Each student will select a system (or family of systems) and analyze it in the context of current law and policy. This analysis should involve both legal and technical aspects, and the end product should be a paper in the style of a technical or law review article. Your target audience is a first-year graduate student in computer science: someone with general technical knowledge, but no deep knowledge of the system you select or of the law.

The process of writing these papers will be as follows:

topic selection: choose an overall system/topic for your analysis
outline: create an outline of your analysis, including major areas of inquiry and a partial list of relevant related work (both technical + legal)
draft: write a first draft of your paper
review: review another student’s paper
final submission: submit a final version of your paper after incorporating edits from the review

Sample topics

To get you started, here is a list of topics and prompts. Feel free to use one, or adapt it to your interests, or choose another topic entirely. You should strongly consider running new topics by the instructor early to get feedback.

Is running a Tor node legal in the US? The analysis would look at the various laws implicated and the types of service(s) Tor nodes provide.
Smartphones are much more than phones. What standards should apply to cellphone searches in both pre-warrant contexts (e.g., incident to arrest) and post-warrant contexts? What details of the phone (including the presence of particular privacy-preserving apps) might be implicated? Which of such details might require new law (case or statutory) to satisfactorily address, and why?
What power, if any, do technologies such as Tor and I2P have to stymie law-abiding investigators in the US? What options (technological, such as NITs; policy, such as “golden key”; legal, such as forced disclosure laws) are available, and which are valid under current law?
Metadata is a slippery concept: IP addresses are metadata. Email To: fields are metadata. Is an email Subject: line? What about the “X-Mailer:” header? Analyze at least five distinct protocols in depth (e.g., Bluetooth, Tor, HTTP, IP, DNS) and create a coherent, justifiable standard for data vs. metadata.

Grading, deadlines and requirements

Each of the following deadline is a soft deadline. Check them early and decide if you’ll need more time (for example, if you know you have a major exam due near one of them). If so, email me at least two full business days in advance to request an extension, and I will almost certainly grant your request.

(10%) topic selection: You must choose a topic, similar in style to the format above – one or two sentences that describe the overall content of the paper, and possible a question or two where you plan to focus your inquiry. It’s fine if your topic ends up drifting somewhat during later phases of your writing, though you should probably run major changes by me if they come up. Due Thu 27 Oct.
(20%) outline and references: I don’t care if your outline is formal or informal, but I do care that you have a one-to-two page outline, covering the questions you’re asking, background (descriptions of relevant law and technology), major points of analysis, and reasoning. You should also have a non-trivial start on your references, including citations of technical specifications of the relevant system(s), research papers about the system(s), relevant laws, and legal articles and commentary. Prof. Levine may be a particularly useful resource here, but you need to ask him early, as usually has a several day lag in answering emails; you might also pay a visit to the tall brick building in the center of campus (a “library”) and ask one of the skilled employees there (“librarians”) for help in locating relevant references. There are many specialized resources (other than “google”) one can use for research. Due Thu 10 Nov.
(25%) draft: Turn your outline into a reasonable draft of a paper. It need not be perfect, but it should be mostly complete. (Consider using LaTeX and BibTeX to write your paper and organize your references, especially if you’ve never used LaTeX before, as this paper will be relatively straightforward.) Due: Tue Nov 29.
(15%) review: I will give each of you another student’s draft to review. You will be expected to provide a list of constructive, actionable criticisms and suggestions, both to me and to the other student. Due: Thu Dec 08.
(30%) final submission: Submit a final version of your paper, including a properly formatted set of references, after incorporating edits from the review and otherwise finalizing the paper. Due: Wed Dec 14.

For your final paper submission, please use a two-column, single-spaced format, 10 point (or larger) font. Please format for readability, not for an impressive page count. The page count does not matter, so long as the paper thoroughly addresses the questions it poses in its introduction.