Computers, Privacy and the Law

From 1999 to 2012, this course offering required an extended description. In 2013, Edward Snowden changed that.

Our primary goal is to learn what has happened in the relation between citizens, their States, and the Net during the last ten years.
Focusing only in part on the United States---with due consideration to the situation in all the world's large societies---we will discover where we as people stand in relation to State power now that digital technology is reorganizing humankind. Because the story is not a happy one, we will also consider what we can do about it. We will learn technology as well as law: every student will learn skills
necessary to achieve tolerable levels of privacy in communication and reading, for example. No one will leave unfrightened; one or two will have discovered their vocation.

All reading and writing we do is contained within the course wiki; there is no examination. Students are evaluated on multiple drafts of
analytic essays, and on their contributions to written and class discussion.

The website for this course can be found at http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/wiki/CompPrivConst