Sunday, October 10, 2004

I.A.N.A.L. ...

The last week has been a long one. I've had to deal with a whole load of unrelated and unbelievably complicated situations that are somehow on my plate because I "do technology". They're not technical problems, however, they're social, political and legal ones. They just happen to involve computers (or cell phones, or telephones, or ...)

Somewhere along the way I felt highly unqualified to do the sorts of things I was being asked to do. Apart from my trusty copy of Cyberlaw@SA II (it's in the library) and a few things I've picked up here and there, I have very little legal knowledge. IANAL. Nor, after the last week, do I want to be. All this, however, got me thinking ...

Should the computer science or information systems types not be collaborating with the law types to offer and introductory course to Cyberlaw, interception, libel, etc? Certainly if you're a systems administrator on the modern Internet, you need some idea of where you fit into the big bad legal system. What am I legally allowed to do to your e-mail? How do I legally stonewall people who want information I don't think they should have? Is SPAM legal? What liability do I have if I start blocking porn on my cache server? These are all questions that Reinhardt Buys has helped answer in his book, but they're also things that should be part of a modern ICT syllabus.

Perhaps this is why I'm going to a workshop on Information Security Policies being hosted by DITCHE later this month.

Along the same lines of course, knowing a bit of sociology and psychology would have helped a lot this week too ;-) I'm not sure they entirely fit into computer science though. They fit into management somewhere, and that's a whole different kettle of fish.

(PS. Thanks to Nimnod for the strawberry yoghurt)

posted by guy at: 14:34 SAST | path: /issues | permanent link