MIT 6.805/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier
in coordination with
Harvard Law School: Internet and Society
Fall Semester, 1999

6.805/STS085 Final Paper

1. A final paper proposal, including a statement of your thesis, a list of references, and a rough outline. This is due on November 23.

2. A final paper, due on December 9.

No extensions will be given on either part. Getting to the proposal state will require a serious amount of work, so don't leave this until the last minute.

Producing an excellent final paper

In the midterm paper, many people had trouble developing a clear, focussed thesis. For the final paper, it's not enough to write a paper that just surveys some area, especially if it mostly repeats what we've said covered in class or in the readings. Instead, your paper should have a thesis -- an idea or point of view that you develop and defend throughout the paper. Your thesis should be clearly stated at the outset of the paper, and it should provide the overall focus and organization for the paper.

Please read (again) the note from the RPI Writing Center, Thesis Development in Analytical Writing. To see what makes a good thesis.

Pick a narrow, focussed topic, where you could expect to make a real contribution. We would much rather see papers that are narrow and deep, rather than attempts to survey entire areas. We're looking for insight and originality, not just a survey of what other people have written. Your best opportunity for producing a good paper is to choose a topic where you can combine your technical expertise with the legal and policy background you've obtained in this course. It's especially good to interview people who are involved in these areas, rather than drawing only on secondary sources. Read some of the papers written for previous semesters of this course, especially the ones from fall 98, to see the quality of paper we're expecting.

The assignment for November 23

1. Begin by filling in the following template:

   My final paper will deal with [fill in topic area]. The provisional thesis of my paper is [state your thesis].

   "Provisional thesis" means that you may change your conclusions as you do more research. But, even at this stage, we expect you to have a clear idea and a point of view that will guide your development of the paper. Do not underestimate the work required to get to this point. Doing the research to select and to produce even a provisioal thesis, will be a significant fraction of the overall effort to produce the paper!

2. Give a list of references that you are using in developing your thesis and doing research to defend the thesis. There must be at least four references. These can include research articles, law journal papers, or people you have interviewed or expect to interview.

3. Give a rough outline of the paper. What topics are you planning to address, and in what order? What arguments are you planning to make to defend your thesis?

Send proposals by email to all three of us: Hal, Mike, and Danny. Please send ASCII text only, no attachments. We must receive these by November 23. Proposal that are late will result in a penalized grade on the final paper.

Final paper: Due December 8

Papers should be 5000-7500 words long.

As with the midterm, we require good quality writing. Papers with spelling, grammatical, or stylistic errors will received penalized grades. Good resources on writing are The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing, by Les Perelman, Ed Barrett, and Jim Paradis (available on the Web at MIT only), and Grammar and Style Notes by Jack Lynch.

Get some people to read and comment on your paper before you turn it in. It may also be valuable to check over your paper with someone in the Writing Center.

Turning the paper in

Be careful in proofreading. It can be very difficult to spot errors in on-line writing.

Approach and Scope of Paper

On the other hand, we do expect you to have opinions and a point of view on your topic -- not to just write a book report or a summary of what other people have said.

Be sure to back up your arguments with facts and by citing source material, including Court ruling if this is relevant to your topic. There is a tremendous amount of reference material available on-line in the course archives and other places on the net. Searching for law review articles with Lexis-Nexis can be extremely valuable way to find material.

If you cite unpublished on-line material, you can include citations or links to the appropriate URLs in the bibliography.

Topic

Here are some suggested topics. Remember that these are only suggestions. Don't feel constrained to do something in this list. You might also look through the exemplary papers from previous classes. Feel free, by the way, to use these papers as references. By the same token, don't do something that just rehashes papers from previous semesters.

• Last August, Stefan Brands at University of Eindhoven published a Ph.D. thesis called Rethinking public-key infrastructures and digital certificates. This work is highly technical, so we wouldn't expect you to do a technical review. But the thesis does contain several good non-technical sections of the thesis that explain just what new capabilities Brands's work provides. Write a paper describing Brands's contributions in the light of some of the issues surrounding digital identity and authentication. Which aspects of the "digital identity and privacy" conundrum does this work address, and which aspects remain problematic?

• On November 3, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age, which you can find described in the following press release. The chair of the committee that wrote the report is Prof. Randy Davis of the EECS Department. Write a critical review of this report, in the light of some of the issues we explored this semester.

• Are digital signatures legally binding? Should they be? What are the issues here? Note that there has been extensive writing on this topic. Some examples are the American Bar Association's Digital Signature Guidelines and the paper by David Fillingham written for this course in 1997. There should also be lots of papers in law journals, which you can find through Lexis.

• Over the past few months, the IETF has been wrestling with the question of whether the provisions of CALEA would require building provisions for wiretapping into standard Internet protocols such as IPv6 (see, for example, IETF meeting: Wiretap debate full of static.) Most recently (November 11) IETF members voted against doing this, although several vendors said that they would build this capability into their products anyway. Analyze the legal, political, and technical issues here. What is your view on what should happen? If you work on this topic, you should be prepared to do a lot of original research, including interviewing several of the main participants in the debate.

• Last month, the Center for Democracy and Technology issued an analysis of the Clinton's Administration's approach to critical infrastructure protection, Critical Infrastructure Protection: Threats to Privacy and Other Civil Liberties and Concerns with Government Mandates on Industry. It is also possible that the Administration will issue its own guidelines in the next few days. Write a paper reviewing the issues and the debate here. Are CDT's concerns valid, and are their criticisms legitimate? In writing this paper, you should be prepared to review the reports on critical infrastructure protection that have issue over the past couple of years, and also to interview some of the people involved in preparing these reports.

• More suggestions to come.

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Last modified: November 25 1999, 9:01 PM