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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On Tuesday the State of California sent a letter to the Bitcoin Foundation, saying that the Foundation might be in violation of California’s law against running an unregistered money transmission…
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Open-source Governance in Bitcoin
Josh Kroll, Ian Davey, and I have a new paper, The Economics of Bitcoin Mining, or Bitcoin in the Presence of Adversaries, from the Workshop on Economics of Information Security.…
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I Join the EFF and Others in Calling for Craigslist to Drop CFAA Claims
[Cross-posted on my blog, Managing Miracles] Craigslist is suing several companies that scrape data from Craigslist advertisements. These companies, like Padmapper and 3taps, repurpose the data in order to provide…
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The low-transaction-fee argument for Bitcoin is silly
A common argument advanced by Bitcoin proponents is that unlike banks and credit cards, Bitcoin has low (or even zero) transaction fees. The claim is a complete red herring, and…
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On the Legal Importance of Viewing Genes as Code
The Supreme Court yesterday issued its opinion in the much–awaited Myriad case, which challenged the validity of patents on isolated human genes. The Court held that the isolated genetic sequences…
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Do Judges Play a Role After the NSA Call Records Have Been Collected?
Those who defend the NSA’s massive call records collection program point out that although the program allows indiscriminate data collection, it also meaningfully restricts data analysis and use. They note,…
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51% foreign test doesn't protect Americans
One of the notable claims we have heard, in light of the Verizon / PRISM revelations, is that data extraction measures are calibrated to make sure that 51% or more…
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Revisiting the potential hazards of the 'Protect America' act
In light of recent news reports about NSA wiretapping of U.S. Internet communications, folks may be interested in some background on the ‘warrantless wiretapping’ provisions of the Protect America act,…
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Twenty-First Century Eavesdropping
Yesterday’s revelations about widespread government data collection led me to re-read my nine-post series on “Twenty-First Century Eavesdropping” from back in 2006. I was surprised to see how closely that…
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How Consensus Drives Bitcoin
Josh Kroll, Ian Davey and I have a new paper on the dynamics of Bitcoin, which we’re going to release in a few days. This post is the first in…