LAW 614 - Election Law Security

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This course introduces students to the intersection of cybersecurity and election law. The law of election security is a multi-disciplinary area which reflects the complex and vast election ecosystem. The purpose of cybersecurity is to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information and information systems. The practice of cybersecurity law therefore is the practice of any law that enables these functional principles. Students will receive an overview of how these laws are traditionally applied to support these cybersecurity functional principles. The generic practice of cybersecurity law could be applied to the protection of nearly any information system and the information that travers those systems. Recent cyber attacks on democratic and election processes across the world, however, uncovered that the legal community is ill- equipped to address the particular challenges of securing election systems. It takes not only cybersecurity lawyers to consider a legal framework to support traditional network defense activities (for example, threat hunting), but also election lawyers to consider whether providing network defense services to campaigns, legislators, and election officials violates campaign finance laws, procurement laws or ethics regulations. It takes transactional lawyers to develop legal agreements for deployment of network defense, and national security lawyers to consider whether a private sector entity or governmental entity is acting as a foreign influencer outside of the United States. In short, it takes not only cybersecurity lawyers to develop appropriate frameworks for securing elections, but also election lawyers, corporate lawyers, procurement lawyers, and government ethics lawyers. There is a demonstrable gap in the legal profession of lawyers trained to understand and handle the complex and vast global election security ecosystem. This course will expose students to those gaps and provide a framework for considering solutions.