Reading that letter makes me proud of the Security Group at Cambridge University. Ross Anderson took us for a couple of Security courses in second/third year Computer Science and was interesting, direct and completely no-nonsense. He emphasised that policy and ignorance were often the main causes of failures, especially with LAS, NHS centralisation (UK government projects). I find strong individuals like Anderson inspiring when they take on organisations who attack knowledge rather than being hands-on and fixing their systems.

The Security II course is especially relevant. I am not sure that everyone can access these resources but the lecture notes cover a variety of modern hardware approaches to security (including chip-and-pin). Try: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/SecurityII/

I highly recommend Anderson's Security Engineering, the first edition is available online: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html