World of Spies: Keeping Secrets (FutureLearn)

What topics will you cover?

- Introduction to spying and the common United States agencies that collect intelligence

- Reasons for encrypting information

- Various ways information is encrypted

- Using logical thinking and linguistic patterns to break encrypted messages without a key

- How traditional decryption methods led to the modern day computer

- Why protecting information is important

- How information we provide in social media can compromise the safety of our personal information

-The effectiveness of modern day encryption

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you'll be able to...

- Investigate reasons for encrypting information.

- Compare various methods for encrypting information.

- Apply logical thinking, linguistic patterns, and historical enciphering methods to encipher and decipher messages.

- Evaluate weaknesses of various encoding and enciphering methods.

- Debate the necessity and effectiveness of protecting information.