CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
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As the year draws to a close, it’s time to review the top tech policy stories of 2013. (1) NSA Surveillance. The most important story by far was the revelations…
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RSA doesn't quite deny undermining customers' crypto
Reuters reported on Saturday that the NSA had secretly paid RSA Data Security $10 million to make a certain flawed algorithm the default in RSA’s BSAFE crypto toolkit, which many…
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Software backdoors and the White House NSA panel report
Yesterday the five-member panel appointed by the President to review “Intelligence and Communications Technologies” issued its report. The report is serious and substantial, and makes 46 specific recommendations for change.…
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Judge Leon explains why the NSA uses everyone's metadata
There are many interesting things to discuss in Judge Leon’s opinion from yesterday, finding the NSA’s phone metadata program likely unconstitutional. In this post, I’ll focus on an interesting bit…
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How to protect yourself against NSA tracking
Jonathan Mayer and I have a new piece in Slate about how the NSA piggybacks on the web tracking activities of advertisers and other services. Essentially, the trackers tag computers…
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The Politics of the EU Court Data Retention Opinion: End to Mass Surveillance?
The Wall Street Journal headlines: “EU Court Opinion: Data Retention Directive Incompatible With Fundamental Rights”. The Opinion is strong, but in fact not yet an outright victory to privacy and…
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Privacy and Cloud Computing in Public Schools
As reported today by the New York Times here, we are releasing our research study this morning on “Privacy and Cloud Computing in Public Schools.” Districts across the country are…
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How to stop spies from piggybacking on commercial Web tracking
Tonight the Washington Post published a story about the NSA’s eavesdropping on the unique tracking cookies used by advertisers and analytics companies to identify their users. By capturing these unique…
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Princeton CS research on secure communications
Continuing our series on security research here at Princeton Computer Science, I’d like to talk about how new information about government surveillance is driving research on how to secure communications.…
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New Research: Cheating on Exams with Smartwatches
A Belgian university recently banned all watches from exams due to the possibility of smartwatches being used to cheat. Similarly, some standardized tests in the U.S. like the GRE have banned all digital watches.…