Domestic and Foreign Services Assignment
For this assignment, you will compare domestic and foreign options for various types of services. You will compare the legal and political landscape of the United States and the country or countries in which the foreign services are offered in order to determine whether a domestic or foreign service provides greater privacy.
Assignment Information
The application areas for this assignment are national security, intelligence, and politics. However, you are welcome to choose this assignment if you have an interest in its content, regardless of your major.
Prerequisites
- You should be able to perform Internet searches to locate sources relevant to the topics covered by this assignment.
- You should be able to utilize CCU Library resources to aid in research.
- You should be able to think critically about the claims made in sources that you find.
- You should be able to create a logically organized presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress.
- You should be able to record a video presentation by narrating slides while recording a screencast.
- You should be able to edit the recorded video and upload the result to Moodle.
Background
Most of us use various Internet-based services for different tasks. For example, you probably have an email account apart from your CCU email (which uses Office365). You might also use a cloud storage service other than the CCU-provided OneDrive. If you back up your computer regularly (as you should), you might be using some kind of network backup solution for that purpose. For day-to-day communications, you probably use some kind of instant messaging system on your phone and/or computer(s).
Unless you self-host everything you do (which is NOT advisable for email for security and spam reasons), you will rely on either a company or a group of volunteers to provide connectivity for the various services you use. While volunteer-operated services, such as Syncthing and matrix, might not have a profit motive and therefore might provide more privacy, the same cannot be said for those services that are provided by corporations.
While we all know that corporations can spy on their own users and sell data to third parties, the location where the corporation is legally incorporated, and to some extent the locations where the corporation operates, also matter from a privacy perspective. Privacy laws and regulations vary geographically. For example, Europe has the General Data Protection Regulation, which places some restrictions on data collection and transfers. In the United States, the California Consumer Privacy Act allows consumers to limit the sale of personal information, at least for consumers who are California residents. At the same time, assaults on privacy take place regularly in the courts and legislatures around the world. Here in the US, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision of the Supreme Court calls into question whether or not a person has a right to privacy from federal or state governments (this decision was the one that overturned Roe v. Wade). In Europe, there is a proposal for a system called Chat Control that would use artificial intelligence to monitor Internet communications in real time and alert the police to any suspected child exploitation (including transmitting the entire contents of communications directly to the police even in the event of false positives).
For this assignment, you will focus on the issue of where a service is located to determine what special privacy safeguards or risks might be present in using the service. These safeguards and risks are created by laws, regulations, and court rulings that could be applied to the service provider based on legal jurisdiction. The objective of your research should be to answer questions about where in the world different kinds of services should be based in order to provide maximum privacy to the user. Focus on commonly used services, like email, cloud storage, backups, and instant messaging. You may extend this list to other services with justification.
Requirements
Prepare a video presentation that includes the following:
- Take a position on the optimal corporate location for each of the following services: email, cloud storage, backup, and instant messaging. You may add additional services by justifying their use. Your position could favor one region for all services, it could favor some regions over others for certain services, or it could be that the location doesn’t really matter in practical terms. Justify the position you take using sources from your research. Focus on the privacy laws, regulations, and any court rulings you find that apply to each location.
- Give at least one example of a service based in each region that you consider when evaluating the privacy laws and regulatory landscape for that area or country.
- Cite at least 8 sources in your presentation, limiting Wikipedia to no more than two of these sources. Be sure that you have both inline citations for the source and enough information that someone watching the presentation can find the original source (e.g. references slides). You may use any format you want for the citations (APA, legal, etc.).
Your video should be about 15-20 minutes long, and it must contain visual aids (such as slides) that accompany your presentation. You can record your video using screencasting software on your computer, or you can record your presentation using your cell phone.
Grading
Please review the Domestic and Foreign Services Rubric prior to uploading your video presentation. This rubric explains how this assignment option will be graded and can be used as a checklist to ensure that you have completed all the required parts of the assignment.
