Author: Ed Felten
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Syndromic Surveillance: 21st Century Data Harvesting
[This article was written by a pseudonymous reader who calls him/herself Enigma Foundry. I’m publishing it here because I think other readers would find it interesting. – Ed Felten] The recent posts about 21st Century Wiretapping described a government program which captured, stored, filtered and analyzed large quantities of information, information which the government had…
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The Last Mile Bottleneck and Net Neutrality
When thinking about the performance of any computer system or network, the first question to ask is “Where is the bottleneck?” As demand grows, one part of the system reaches its capacity first, and limits performance. That’s the bottleneck. If you want to improve performance, often the only real options are to use the bottleneck…
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The Exxon Valdez of Privacy
Recently I moderated a panel discussion, at Princeton Reunions, about “Privacy and Security in the Digital Age”. When the discussion turned to public awareness of privacy and data leaks, one of the panelists said that the public knows about this issue but isn’t really mobilized, because we haven’t yet seen “the Exxon Valdez of privacy”…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: False Positives
Lately I’ve been writing about the policy issues surrounding government wiretapping programs that algorithmically analyze large amounts of communication data to identify messages to be shown to human analysts. (Past posts in the series: 1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7.) One of the most frequent arguments against such programs is that there will be…
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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.…