Year: 2006
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Reconciling with the Law
When the NSA’s wiretapping program first came to light, the White House said, mysteriously, that they didn’t get warrants for all of their wiretaps because doing so would have been impractical. Some people dismissed that as empty rhetoric. But for the rest of us, it was a useful hint about how the program worked, implying…
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Adobe Scares Microsoft with Antitrust Threat?
Microsoft has changed the next versions of Windows and Office after antitrust lawsuit threats from Adobe, according to Ina Fried’s article at news.com. Here’s a summary of Microsoft’s changes: [Microsoft] is making two main changes. With Vista [the next version of Windows], it plans to give computer makers the option of dropping some support for…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Content-Based Suspicion
Yesterday I argued that allowing police to record all communications that are flagged by some automated algorithm might be reasonable, if the algorithm is being used to recognize the voice of a person believed (for good reason) to be a criminal. My argument, in part, was that that kind of wiretapping would still be consistent…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Recognition
For the past several weeks I’ve been writing, on and off, about how technology enables new types of wiretapping, and how public policy should cope with those changes. Having laid the groundwork (1; 2; 3; 4; 5) we’re now ready for to bite into the most interesting question. Suppose the government is running, on every…
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Art of Science, and Princeton Privacy Panel
Today I want to recommend two great things happening at Princeton, one of which is also on the Net. Princeton’s second annual Art of Science exhibit was unveiled recently, and it’s terrific, just like last year. Here’s some background, from the online exhibit: In the spring of 2006 we again asked the Princeton University community…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Your Dog Sees You Naked
Suppose the government were gathering information about your phone calls: who you talked to, when, and for how long. If that information were made available to human analysts, your privacy would be impacted. But what if the information were made available only to computer algorithms? A similar question arose when Google introduced its Gmail service.…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Storing Communications Data
Today I want to continue the post-series about new technology and wiretapping (previous posts: 1, 2, 3), by talking about what is probably the simplest case, involving gathering and storage of data by government. Recall that I am not considering what is legal under current law, which is an important issue but is beyond my…
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Zfone Encrypts VoIP Calls
Phil Zimmerman, who created the PGP encryption software, and faced a government investigation as a result, now offers a new program, Zfone, that provides end-to-end encryption of computer-to-computer (VoIP) phone calls, according to a story in yesterday’s New York Times. One of the tricky technical problems in encrypting communications is key exchange: how to get…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Not So Hypothetical
Two weeks ago I started a series of posts (so far: 1, 2) about how new technologies change the policy issues around government wiretapping. I argued that technology changed the policy equation in two ways, by making storage much cheaper, and by enabling fancy computerized analyses of intercepted communications. My plan was to work my…
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Princeton-Microsoft IP Conference Liveblog
Today I’m at the Princeton-Microsoft Intellectual Property Conference. I’ll be blogging some of the panels as they occur. There are parallel sessions, and I’m on one panel, so I can’t cover everything. The first panel is on “Organizing the Public Interest”. Panelists are Yochai Benkler, David Einhorn, Margaret Hedstrom, Larry Lessig, and Gigi Sohn. The…