The purpose of this course is to advance critical thinking, research and inquiry skills as a first step in the thesis writing process. This course identifies and teaches the principles of quality investigational research including research methodologies, sources, thesis organization and development. The goal of the sequence is to provide a sound foundation for initiating a thesis project and to support the degree objectives of the MA-HLS program by preparing students to conduct graduate-level, policy-relevant research and deliver the results of this research in an academically rigorous thesis.

(3 Credits)

This course provides an overview of the essential ideas that constitute the emerging discipline of homeland security. The objectives of the course are to expand students’ abilities to think critically, analyze and communicate the central tenents of homeland security from a social justice perspective. Students will examine the evolution of terrorist movements, strategies to combat terrorism, crisis management, response to conventional and non-conventional threats and the impact of heightened security and surveillance on individual rights and civil liberties.

(3 Credits)

This course analyses principles of critical infrastructure, in both the private and public sectors, vital to our community on a local, state, and federal level while demonstrating how critical infrastructure protection is one of the cornerstones of homeland security. This course evaluates risk reduction techniques to determine the optimal strategy for protection of each sector of critical infrastructure. This will include risk assessments for hard and soft targets that address risk mitigation plans and appropriate countermeasures in an all-hazards approach. Students will also apply vulnerability analysis techniques to critical infrastructure within their multijurisdictional region and derive optimal strategies and draft policies for prevention of future terrorist attacks.

(3 Credits)

This course serves as an introduction for homeland security professionals to terrorism as a psychological phenomenon. Government agencies involved in homeland security need to understand the psychological consequences of mass-casualty terrorist attacks and other disasters. This course provides a broad overview of the psychological effects of terrorism; the status of and fallacies related to the interventions applied to victims of terrorism and the generalized fear and anxiety experienced by the public at large. Current government strategies used to disseminate information to terrorist groups; psychological phenomena related to media coverage of terrorism; misconceptions and inaccuracies about the socio-political and religious motivations of terrorist groups; “profiling” and the typical psychological and cultural makeup of modern terrorists; and the social and cultural psychology of public conceptions of terrorists and acts of terror will be examined.

(3 Credits)

This course examines key questions and issues facing the U.S. intelligence community and its role in homeland security and homeland defense, including terrorism, emergency management, and cyber security. Intelligence community operations at the state and local levels, with federal cooperation through the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 are examined. This will afford students the opportunity to address, analyze, and critique policy, oversight, intelligence support, organizational protection of civil liberties and substantive issues regarding homeland defense/security and national decision-making.

(3 Credits)

This course is intended to provide practitioners with the opportunity to expand their ability to apply their education (undergraduate and graduate), training (vocational, career, job-related), and experience and knowledge to the homeland security capstone project. The homeland security capstone encompasses material in the other MA-HLS courses and, provides practitioners with the skills to perform their professional roles in new ways that will initiate and sustain change even at the level of the broader institutional context of governance in which they must function. This course completes the thesis project as the final step before graduation.

(3 Credits)

Prerequisite: None

This course is designed to highlight important topics pertinent to the protection of human rights during a time of national security concerns. Protecting individual rights is an inseparable part of a democratic society, the rule of law and a government dedicated to the advancement of the common good. The aim of this course is to create a clear understanding among students how respect for human rights can positively impact human security and promote civil societies.

Offered fall/spring semester. (3 Credits)

The purpose of this course is to provide students with insight into the structural, conceptual, intellectual foundations and implications of a multidisciplinary approach to homeland security. Students will examine how the perceptions of homeland security varies among professionals in the field, the general public and differing ethnic, racial, religious and socio-economic groups.

(3 Credits)

A common approach to identifying defensive strategies is to go on the offensive. The theory is, if a friendly entity identifies vulnerabilities, they can be remediated before an attacker can identify them. However, some of these practices simply result in a false sense of security for organizations. Students will come away from this course with an understanding of what types of offensive security practices would be best for their organization.

Offered fall/spring semester. (3 Credits)

The threat landscape in the world today is poorly understood, often being diluted to easy and pithy words and phrases that do not adequately explain what is happening or who the attackers are. This course is about clearly identifying threat actors and their motivations, including the geopolitical and economic reasons for their actions. Misunderstanding the adversary can lead to missing the best approaches to circumventing attacks, as well as opportunities to think more broadly about how to address security-related issues globally rather than using only local controls at each individual business.

Offered fall/spring semester. (3 Credits)

*Easily Stack Gradaute Cybersecurity Certificates: This course can be applied toward the requirements for each of the three Post Baccalaureate Cybersecurity Certificates when stacked into the MS Global Cybersecurity degree.

Offensive security can be helpful to identify vulnerabilities that need to be addressed, but you can’t protect against everything. Organizations need to be vigilant and have the necessary visibility to notice when attackers are attempting to compromise systems. This requires appropriate architectures that enable extensive logging and the ability to consume and act on those logs. Again, this requires threat intelligence to know what is happening in the world with respect to threat groups and their activities, as well as an understanding of business requirements to identify attempts to compromise critical information assets.

Offered fall/spring semester. (3 Credits)

Logging and alerting are important to get visibility into activities within the business systems but as soon as an alert happens, the organization needs to be able to respond. Often, there is a focus on the purely technical investigation when people look at incident response. This entirely misses the planning that is required when building the incident response plan and framework, since there are a variety of legal, management, regulatory, and communications considerations. These are not the types of considerations that should be considered in the middle of a crisis when an attacker is in the environment, as that is a luxury of time that no organization has at that moment.

Offered fall/spring semester. (3 Credits)