50 years ago institutional racism was rife in the American south. States created laws designed to limit or stop the voting of African-American citizens.

The Voting Rights act of 1965 changed all that.

While most people think the act was a success, there are some today who want to challenge a major provision of the law.

This provision, Section 5, requires states with a history of voter suppression to gain approval from the US justice department before changing election laws or procedures. 

In the past 30 years, the Justice Department has used the law to strike down more than 200 discriminatory laws in the state of Alabama alone.

Still today, Members of an Alabama County want the law changed and have taken their argument to the Supreme Court.

So why is Shelby County, Alabama challenging this law?

According to their lawsuit the, “Dire local conditions” that once made this law a necessity no longer exist.  They believe that the legislation achieved its goal as African Americans and Hispanics wield  significant political power.

They suggest section 5 is creating an opportunity for discrimination against white people. 

However, Ernest Montgomery, a current city council member in Calera, Alabama takes the opposing view.

When he was running for office the city officials redrew his district map because of a population boom in minorities. 

Montgomery told CBS News the representation under the old map was 67% African American and under the new map the number decreased to 28%.

After The boundary changes Montgomery, an African-American lost his seat. Due to Section 5 however, the Justice Department demanded a new election in the district restoring the old election map. Montgomery won the re-vote. 

Is discrimination dead? Will the Supreme Court overturn a law which was so favorably renewed?  Share your thoughts.

CSEE professor Anupam Joshi–director of the new UMBC Center for Cybersecurity–has been invited to give a keynote talk at the Security & Privacy Symposium. The symposium will take place at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur India from February 28 to March 1. His talk is entitled “A Semantically Rich approach to Cybersecurity”.

The objective of the symposium is to bring together students, faculty, and researchers from across India to discuss the growing field of security and privacy. Dr. Joshi joins a dozen fellow scholars who will discuss topics including emerging security and privacy challenges and privacy and security in online social media.

Dr. Joshi is an Oros Family Professor of Technology. He has been a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) for more than a decade, teaching courses in Mobile Computing, Security, Social Media, and Operating Systems at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

His own research interests deal with Intelligent Networked Systems, with a focus on Mobile Computing. He has recently received a grant from NSF’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, a three year project to investigate how to better manage security and privacy constraints while querying semantically annotated linked data sources. The project, Policy Compliant Integration of Linked Data, is a collaboration with researchers at M.I.T. and the University of Texas at Dallas.

On March 27th, Dominick Tolli of the American Red Cross visited UMBC to discuss four revolutionary mobile apps his team created to better serve people impacted by natural disasters and other emergencies. When Superstorm Sandy hit, tens of thousands of people accessed the apps for information on storm conditions, available shelters, first aid and even gasoline pick-up sites.

The Baltimore Sun reported on the event, organized by Richard Bissell of the Emergency Health Services Dept., who serves on the Scientific Advisory Council of the American Red Cross. Bissell commented that the app developers “are helping move the Red Cross into the public in a way that has never been done before.”

In an emergency situation, standard forms of communications are often unavailable, making it difficult for public health groups to serve those most in need of help. Bissell says using mobile devices is “actually a pretty robust way of getting information to the people,” because cell phone signals generally remain intact during power outages.

1. As of 2/25 anyone needing to access the WT2013 Bb server from off campus needs to log in to the VPN first.
2. The WT2013 Bb server will be taken completely offline on Friday, 3/15.
3. WT2013 courses will be restored on the UMBC Bb production server by Friday, March 29.  Please note that there will be approximately two weeks when WT2013 courses will be completely unavailable to faculty and students.  We encourage you to download a copy of your grade center, and any other content that you might need to your local machine. If instructors have students finishing incomplete grades, and students must have continuing access to their WT2013 course over spring break, the instructors should put in an RT ticket request prior to Thursday, March 14.

Thank you for your patience during this transition.