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Virginia became the first state this year to require Internet safety courses in its public schools. Illinois and Texas both have laws on the books relating to curriculum and instruction in this area, but Virginia is currently the only state to require such courses according to VNUNet.

As one student in the article pointed out,

James River High School student Maya Towers said: “I thought it was very important because we post a lot of things on the internet. I didn’t know how much information can be exposed.”

This highlights the attitudes of most of our students. While some conceal their identities on MySpace, Facebook, AOL, and other bits of social media, many others blithely post pictures, locations, and even phone numbers and addresses.

Now that my students have discovered Twitter, I’ve had to warn them about being too revealing in their tweets. Few realized that the growing network of followers (particularly for my feed) had access to any information they posted. Fortunately, most of my followers are either students or other folks interested in the educational value of social media. However, even these followers don’t need to know that Ashley and Susie are at the local movie theater alone and will be getting out at 9:45.

The level of naivete among many students is disturbing at best; well-planned curricula in the public schools could go a long ways towards keeping safe as we increasingly live a second life (no pun intended) online.

YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS you, nerd, seemed to be US Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff’s message to Silicon Valley in his patriotic keynote speech at the RSA Conference in San Francisco yesterday.

Chertoff even went as far as saying that future cyber attacks could be on the scale of the attacks suffered by the US in 9/11, a desperate strategy attempting to appeal to the nationalism and conscience of Valley workers, as opposed to appealing to their wallets. (But, hang on, aren’t most of them foreign anyway?)

In what sounded more like a military troop rally, the security chief told the auditorium full of Valley workers to stand up and be counted in America’s fight to secure the cyber highway, noting "The human and economic sacrifices from a cyber-attack can be devastating ... on par with what this country experienced on September 11".

Taking out a small onion and with tears of patriotism in his eyes, he begged the private sector to "please send some of your brightest and best to do service in the government", referring to a new inter-agency group (National Cyber Security Center) set up to act as an early warning system for major network attacks that would help the federal government protect its computer networks from organised cyber attacks. He theatrically added that joining up would be " the best thing you can do for your country".

Chertoff thought it best to instill terror in his yuppie audience about the potential chaos that could be caused if cyber attacks were to hit financial or government bodies, melodramatically stating "a single individual, a small group or a nation state can exact damage and destruction similar to dropping a bomb or explosives."

Noting that the US government took threats to the online world as seriously as those in the real world, Chertoff also outlined government plans to develop the equivalent of the "Manhattan Project" to defend US federal networks and national security interests from the big bad boogey man of large-scale cyber-attacks