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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The main takeaway of two recent disclosures around N.S.A. surveillance practices, is that Americans must re-think ‘U.S. citizenship’ as the guiding legal principle to protect against untargeted surveillance of their…
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A Court Order is an Insider Attack
Commentators on the Lavabit case, including the judge himself, have criticized Lavabit for designing its system in a way that resisted court-ordered access to user data. They ask: If court…
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Lavabit and how law enforcement access might be done in the future
The saga of Lavabit, the now-closed “secure” mail provider, is an interesting object of study. They’re in the process of appealing a court order to produce their SSL private keys,…
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The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that…
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A Start-Up Born at CITP
As is probably the case with many start-ups, Gloobe was born late at night. Early in 2013, on the night of a snowstorm in Princeton, I presented at the student-led…
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Silk Road, Lavabit, and the Limits of Crypto
Yesterday we saw two stories that illustrate the limits of cryptography as a shield against government. In San Francisco, police arrested a man alleged to be Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR),…
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Senate Judiciary Testimony: FISA Oversight
I testified today at a Senate Judiciary committee hearing on Oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Here is the written testimony I submitted.
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The Debian OpenSSL Bug: Backdoor or Security Accident?
On Monday, Ed wrote about Software Transparency, the idea that software is more resistant to intentional backdoors (and unintentional security vulnerabilities) if the process used to create it is transparent.…
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Software Transparency
Thanks to the recent NSA leaks, people are more worried than ever that their software might have backdoors. If you don’t believe that the software vendor can resist a backdoor…