End of Comprehensives

A major milestone in the pursuit of a doctoral degree is the comprehensive exam process. For me, this process is now complete. The next step is the prospectus defense. I will be spending the summer preparing the prospectus documentation with the hopes of defense in Fall. I can honestly state that the process was not pleasant and I am extremely happy that is it over.The summer will also allow me to re-organize my collections in Mendeley and really get started on the process. My primary concern now is the time frame as well as setting up milestones for deliverables. The issue with the dissertation process is that there are no really defined deliverables. At this point I need to come up with some form of schedule to keep on a writing track. 

At the same time, I need to prepare two courses for Fall. The first is a research methods course, one that has been taught forever, but this time it will be on campus. I would like to make the course as least confusing as possible for the undergrads. The second course is one on organized crime. Traditionally this would revolve around the Italian mafia, but I want to expose students to many more of the organized crime groups worldwide. I had the hardest time finding a text that I liked, and ultimately decided on journal articles and government information (FBI, DEA, Interpol, CIA) to provide the reading materials. I am really looking forward to this course. 

The final project for summer is a revamp of my cybercrime course. I have used two different texts and they were both mostly good readers, but the order in which the information was presented was always a little off for me. I decided that I have enough notes, class projects, and former participation to really make a revamp work. I am laying out the new schedule and calendar now and I hope to be complete in about two weeks. 

All in all this is going to be a busy and great summer, but the stress of comps is over, and I am happy to be ABD. 

Expectation of Privacy

With the recent NSA leaks as well as a number of legal settlements regarding consumer privacy, one of which was Google, the question of privacy was brought up in a unofficial roundtable discussion at my local pub. Every semester we discuss expectation of privacy in both my cybercrime class and the course in corrections, as both deal with correspondence albeit in very different paradigms. I thought I might take a moment and make this post about privacy expectations.

There are some basic misnomers when discussing communications between two parties in the United States. Your privacy is only protected when there is a "reasonable expectation of privacy". So then the question becomes, what is reasonable? A public place? Your home? Work?

What I tell students is this, who owns the system or area? If you are openly discussing something in a bar or public place, there is very little reasonable expectation when compared to your home or a closed door meeting. The same thing holds true for email and other forms of electronic communication. When I am at work, I am operating on a University owned computer. I have no reasonable expectation of privacy save for the terms of use and privacy policy granted by the University. Simply put, the resources I am using are not my own. What if I took a personal computer to campus? This happens daily for students right? There is a reasonable expectation of privacy on a personal device, but the instant information is sent across resources that you do not own, or have no privacy agreement with (example, the University wireless network), the reasonable expectation of privacy drops significantly. This holds true for faculty, staff, and students. Very little is different in corporate environments. The email address at your work is not "yours", in fact is it the property of the sponsoring organization. The same holds true for any resource you do not own, even personal accounts at third parties like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and other web-based email providers.

The reasonable expectation of privacy is the standard litmus test used in court and privacy cases in the United States, so keep this in mind when sending sensitive or critical information of a personal or employment related nature.