Category: Privacy & Security
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The Dangers of the New Trade Secrets Acts
First, I want to state how thrilled I am to be joining the great group here at CITP. Every CITP scholar that I’ve gotten to know over the past several years have become friends and influenced my work in areas ranging from voting machine code access to international lawmaking processes. I’m delighted to be a…
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Takedown 2.0: The Trouble with Broad TROs Targeting Non-Party Online Intermediaries
On August 14, a federal district court in Oregon issued an ex parte temporary restraining order (TRO) in a civil copyright infringement case, ABS-CBN v. Ashby. The defendants in the case are accused of operating several “pirate websites” that infringe the plaintiffs’ copyrights in broadcast television programs. In addition to ordering the defendants to stop…
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Airport Scanners: How Privacy Risk Leads to Security Risk
Debates about privacy and security tend to assume that the two are in opposition, so that improving privacy tends to degrade security, and vice versa. But often the two go hand in hand so that privacy enhances security. A good example comes from the airport scanner study I wrote about yesterday.
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Researchers Show Flaws in Airport Scanner
Today at the Usenix Security Symposium a group of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Michigan will present a paper demonstrating flaws in a full-body scaning machine that was used at many U.S. airports. In this post I’ll summarize their findings and discuss the security and policy implications.
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Why were CERT researchers attacking Tor?
Yesterday the Tor Project issued an advisory describing a large-scale identification attack on Tor hidden services. The attack started on January 30 and ended when Tor ejected the attackers on July 4. It appears that this attack was the subject of a Black Hat talk that was canceled abruptly. These attacks raise serious questions about…
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A Scanner Darkly: Protecting User Privacy from Perceptual Applications
“A Scanner Darkly”, a dystopian 1977 Philip K. Dick novel (adapted to a 2006 film), describes a society with pervasive audio and video surveillance. Our paper “A Scanner Darkly”, which appeared in last year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) and has just received the 2014 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, takes a closer look at…
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"Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution", the NSA Statement, and Our Response
CBS News and a host of other outlets have covered my new paper with Sharon Goldberg, Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution: Warrantless Bulk Surveillance on Americans by Collecting Network Traffic Abroad. We’ll present the paper on July 18 at HotPETS [slides, pdf], right after a keynote by Bill Binney (the NSA whistleblower), and at TPRC…
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No silver bullet: De-identification still doesn't work
Paul Ohm’s 2009 article Broken Promises of Privacy spurred a debate in legal and policy circles on the appropriate response to computer science research on re-identification techniques. In this debate, the empirical research has often been misunderstood or misrepresented. A new report by Ann Cavoukian and Daniel Castro is full of such inaccuracies, despite its claims of “setting…
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"Privacy Comes at a Cost" – The U.S. Supreme Court’s Opinion in Riley v. California
In Riley v. California, a cell phone search-and-seizure opinion delivered by Chief Justice Roberts for a unanimous Court last month, the U.S. Supreme Court squarely recognized, and afforded special protection to, the ubiquitous use and storage of voluminous electronic data of many different types on mobile devices today. The opinion holds that, without a warrant,…