Security, Privacy, and Politics in Higher Education

This chapter introduces the interrelationships of security, privacy and politics in higher education. University curriculum politics are ingrained through organizational structures that control faculty hiring, retention, tenure, and promotion, and self-governance policy bodies such as academic senates and faculty curriculum committees that control curriculum approval and implementation. Compounding the politics of curriculum are different constructs of security and privacy, with security viewed as a technical issue versus privacy as a legal and organizational issue. The author believes that multiple disciplines must learn to work together to teach the constantly changing technical, scientific, legal, and administrative security and privacy landscape. While university “ownership” of security and privacy curriculum may create new political challenges, it has the potential to help limit competing faculty, department and program politics.

Digital Democracy

The purpose of the chapter is to discuss the effects of information and communication technologies on democracy and focuses on the driving forces, citizen and technology, to understand the effects and future implications. The research is based on literature review and uses informative approach to analyze the existing practices in electronic democracy. It inquires the relationship between the theories in communications and democracy, and analyzes the interaction with the citizens from Athenian and the Orwellion perspectives in Politics. It proposes a framework to identify and analyze the driving forces and the issues related to the digital democracy. The resultant effects are important to study as they play a major role in shaping society and uncovering the issues related to direct democracy through integrated technologies. The future of democracy has privacy, security and legal implications but the enlightened citizens, compatible infrastructure and governess bodies will help in eliminating the drawbacks of direct democracy.

Business Cases for Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

Many categories of e-business continue to under-achieve. Their full value cannot be unlocked while key parties distrust the technology or other parties, particularly the scheme’s sponsors. Meanwhile, the explosion in privacy-intrusive technologies has resulted in privacy threats looming ever larger as a key impediment to adoption. Technology can be applied in privacy-enhancing ways, variously to counter invasive technologies, to enable untraceable anonymity, and to offer strong, but more qualified pseudonymity. After their first decade, it is clear that privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are technically effective, but that their adoption lags far behind their potential. As a result, they have not delivered the antidote to distrust in e-business. If individuals are not spontaneously adopting PETs, then the opportunity exists for corporations and government agencies to harness PETs as a core element of their privacy strategies. The financial investment required is not all that large. On the other hand, it is challenging to attract the attention of executives to an initiative of this nature, and then to adapt corporate culture to ensure that the strategy is successfully carried through. This chapter examines PETs, their application to business needs, and the preparation of a business case for investment in PETs.

Privacy Preserving Data Mining

This chapter gives a synopsis of the techniques that exist in the area of privacy preserving data mining. Privacy preserving data mining is important because there is a need to develop accurate data mining models without using confidential data items in individual records. In providing a neat categorization of the current algorithms that preserve privacy for major data mining tasks, the authors hope that students, teachers and researchers can gain an understanding of this vast area and apply the knowledge gained to find new ways of simultaneously preserving privacy and conducting mining.

Assessing the Impact of Governmental Regulations on the IT Industry

Given the recent monumental events including the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as well as the Enron and MCI WorldCom debacles, people have witnessed, and more readily accepted, a significant increase in governmental authority, leading to a dramatic upsurge in the number of governmental regulations imposed on business organizations and society. Neo institutional theory suggests that such significant institutional forces may gravitate an otherwise highly disparate IT industry towards industry wide homogenization.

Emerging Technologies, Emerging Privacy Issues

With each new technology, new ethical issues emerge that threaten both individual and household privacy. This chapter investigates issues relating to three emerging technologies—RFID chips, GPS, and smart motes—and the current and future impacts these technologies will have on society. The outcome will be issues for social discussion and resolution in the coming decades relating to use of these technologies.

Privacy through Security

The chapter discusses how one small business planned for, and implemented, the security of its data in a new enterprise-wide system. The company’s data was perceived as sensitive, and any breach of privacy as commercially critical. From this perspective, the chapter outlines the organizational and technical facets of the policies and practices evidenced. Lessons for other businesses can be drawn from the case by recognizing the need for investments to be made that will address threats in business critical areas. By highlighting the need for organizations to understand the nature of the risk and the probability of an event occurring, the security approaches highlight the need to address both the threats and actions in the event of an incident to reduce the risk to privacy.

Trust Modeling and Management

This chapter introduces trust modeling and trust management as a means of managing trust in digital systems. Transforming from a social concept of trust to a digital concept, trust modeling and management help in designing and implementing a trustworthy digital system, especially in emerging distributed systems. Furthermore, the authors hope that understanding the current challenges, solutions and their limitations of trust modeling and management will not only inform researchers of a better design for establishing a trustworthy system, but also assist in the understanding of the intricate concept of trust.in a digital environment.

Information Systems Security

This study assists organizations and researchers in examining investments in IS security. A questionnaire was developed and administered to managers in Canadian financial firms and educational organizations. The survey examined security threats and the countermeasures adopted by organizations to prevent and respond to security breaches. Data gathered were used to investigate the relationships between investment in security, perceived security, and organizational performance.

Privacy and Security

Enterprise Architecture is a relatively new concept that has been adopted by large organizations for legal, economic, and strategic reasons. It has become a critical component of an overall IT governance program to provide structure and documentation to describe the business processes, information flows, technical infrastructure, and organizational management of an information technology organization. Many different enterprise architecture frameworks have emerged over the past 10 years. Two of the most widely used enterprise architecture frameworks (the Zachman Framework and the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework) are described and their ability to meet the security and privacy needs of an organization is discussed.