Both for the context of this Discussion, and in preparation for your Week 7 Information Paper assignment, please conduct research within the APUS library and through high quality academic resources available online to support your analysis of the following:

• How do law and law enforcement intersect within the scope of keeping ships and ports safe?
• Compare and contrast the maritime legal precepts associated with the attacks on the USS Cole, the USS Bonhomme Richard, the cyberattack on the Port of Houston (https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/23/politics/suspected-foreign-hack-houston/index.html), and the alleged Russian attacks on merchant marine ships during its 2022 invasion of Ukraine (e.g., https://maritime-executive.com/article/merchant-ships-attacked-and-on-fire-off-ukraine).
  • What were the underlying related facts, procedures, and/or legal guidance involved in each of these incidents?
  • How did jurisdiction apply to each? To the extent that the U.S. was directly involved, did it make a difference as to whether the U.S. was in the role of the flag state or the coastal state? If so, why?
• Can the benefits of using hindsight be used to inform future maritime legal or law enforcement practices? For example (and based only on unclassified data), how was a full hack prevented in Houston and what can be done in the future to prevent this kind of risk from being realized? How are data sharing practices limiting responses by other organizations?
  • Does the law currently support or hinder such practices? If it hinders, what should be done about that so that law and security work together?
  • What else can you think of, including lessons learned from these or other incidents that you choose to analyze instead?
  • What perspectives (including those of academic scholars) helped you to decide what to analyze here? How did they help?

Part 2

• How did the acts of researching and analyzing the influences of both legal and non-legal fields help you to better understand this week's topic?
  • Was there any specific part of this background kind of work that was particularly enlightening, or difficult, for you? What was it, and why?
    • What did you learn about persisting through to expand knowledge within that particular research or analysis task?
    • Now that you have done it, do you think that this particular research or analysis task is best done alone or as a collaborative effort? Why? If you were tasked to do something similar for a real world event occurring in real time, how would you like to approach it?
  • Do you think that this kind of exercise helps or hinders you for the possibility of making future decisions under similar circumstances?