Year: 2020
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New Research on Privacy and Security Risks of Remote Learning Software
This post and the paper is jointly authored by Shaanan Cohney, Ross Teixeira, Anne Kohlbrenner, Arvind Narayanan, Mihir Kshirsagar, Yan Shvartzshnaider, and Madelyn Sanfilippo. It emerged from a case study at CITP’s tech policy clinic. As universities rely on remote educational technology to facilitate the rapid shift to online learning, they expose themselves to new…
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How programmers communicate through code, legally
Computer programming, especially in source code, is an expressive form of communication. As such, U.S. law recognizes that communication in the form of source code is protected as freedom of speech by the First Amendment. Recently, Judge G. Murray Snow got this only two-thirds right in a ruling in the U.S. District Court in Arizona.…
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Did Sean Hannity misquote me?
Mostly, I was quoted accurately, although the segment confuses a few different Dominion voting systems with each other. And vulnerabilities are not the same as rigged elections, especially when we have paper ballots in almost all the states. On November 13, 2020, Fox News aired a segment by Sean Hannity, “A deep dive into the…
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New Jersey gets ballot-tracking only half right
Two months before the November 2020 election, I wrote about New Jersey’s plans for an almost-all-vote-by-mail election. What I was told by one county’s Administrator of Elections was, New this year is ballot tracking offered on the NJ Division of Elections’ website. The tracking numbers are not USPS tracking–they can’t tell you where inside the U.S. mail your ballot is–but the tracking…
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CITP call for the postdoctoral track of the CITP Fellows Program 2021-22
The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) is an interdisciplinary center at Princeton University. The center is a nexus of expertise in technology, engineering, public policy, and the social sciences on campus. In keeping with the strong University tradition of service, the center’s research, teaching, and events address digital technologies as they interact with society. CITP is seeking applications…
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Facial recognition datasets are being widely used despite being taken down due to ethical concerns. Here’s how.
This post describes ongoing research by Kenny Peng, Arunesh Mathur, and Arvind Narayanan. We are grateful to Marshini Chetty for useful feedback. Computer vision research datasets have been criticized for violating subjects’ privacy, reinforcing cultural biases, and enabling questionable applications. But regulating their use is hard. For example, although the DukeMTMC dataset of videos recorded…
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Federal judge denies injunction, so 7 states won’t be forced to accept internet ballot return
In the case of Harley v. Kosinski, Matthew Harley (and 9 other individuals) sued the election officials of 7 states (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Georgia). The Plaintiffs, U.S. citizens living abroad, said that voting by mail (from abroad) has become so slow and unreliable that these states should be forced to…
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Election Security and Transparency in 2020
Earlier this month I gave a public lecture at the invitation of the Center for Information Technology Policy and the League of Women Voters. The League had asked, “What can we as voters do to protect our elections and our representative government?” The video is available here. A longer video, that includes introductions, Q&A moderated…
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Vote-by-mail meltdowns in 2020?
If your state is voting by mail, then you can’t process all the ballot envelopes on November 3rd — it’s just too labor-intensive. The details vary by state, as every state has different laws, but (basically) for each mail-in ballot received by the county election clerk, they must: Sort the envelopes by “ballot style” (municipality…
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Election Audits in NJ 2020
It has been well understood for more than 15 years that computerized voting machines can be hacked to make them cheat (or might be misconfigured by accident), and therefore it is essential to have random audits of the ballots. That is: Human inspection of paper ballots that the voters marked, of a random sample of…