The Future of Cybersecurity Reading Group (FCRG) is a discussion seminar that examines contemporary scholarship and policy entrepreneurship in cybersecurity. Hosted by the Law and Information Schools, FCRG is open to enrollment for all law, graduate, and undergraduate students. In our weekly discussions, students explore cybersecurity from different disciplinary perspectives, and with different depths of policy and technical knowledge. FCRG is flexible enough to both accommodate cybersecurity beginners as well as those highly focused on the topic.
We’re beginning to build a community of cybersecurity-interested students through FCRG. Over time, we would like FCRG to evolve into a formal working group that incubates campus research in cybersecurity, that makes connections across policy and technical fields, and that helps students conceive of and pursue fulfilling careers in privacy and security.
Pedagogically, FCRG helps students engage with cybersecurity through critical lenses, including the power dimensions of security, the confusing, blurred contours of public/private governance, and with the human factors elements of security. We also care a great deal about developing your skills. If you sign up for FCRG, you will write response pieces to the literature we read, and you will lead a discussion session among your peers. We think the discussion leadership in particular is a valuable experience that teaches just how much care, restraint, and preparation is necessary to lead an intellectually-engaging discussion.
To get an idea of our previous discussions, you can see past syllabi:
- Fall 2021: Focusing on the history of disinformation and the merits/demerits of it being framed as a cybersecurity issue (Thomas Rid’s Active Measures) and on developments in policing where predictive technologies enable law enforcement to act more like intelligence agencies (Sarah Brayne’s Predict and Surveil).
- Spring 2021: Focusing on cybersecurity and nation-state hacking through the lens of International Relations theory (Ben Buchanan’s Hacker and the State) and cybersecurity and the concept of anti-racism (Benjamin’s Race After Technology).
- Spring 2020: Focusing on the intersections of a heavily national-security focused work, Clarke & Knake’s Fifth Domain, and Laura DeNardis’ careful exploration of how technology governance shapes the policy landscape.
- Spring 2019: This was the darkest semester of FCRG thus far, with a focus on cyber conflict. We read David Sanger’s The Perfect Weapon and the Klimburg’s The Darkening Web.
- Spring 2018: We spent the semester thinking about the parallels between internet security and the security of the telephone network. We read Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell. We also read George Perkovich & Ariel Levite’s, Understanding Cyber Conflict, a book that examines cyber offense and defense through a series of physical-world metaphors.
- Fall 2017: We read the classic 1990 text The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Cliff Stoll, and Stoll, who lives in Berkeley, even came to class to participate in a discussion. We also read Singer and Friedman’s introductory work, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.
- Spring 2017: The readings in this FCRG formed the basis for Urban & Hoofnagle’s Cybersecurity in Context course.