Tag: cybersecurity policy
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NSA Strategy 2012-16: Outsourcing Compliance to Algorithms, and What to Do About It
Over the weekend, two new NSA documents revealed a confident NSA SIGINT strategy for the coming years and a vast increase of NSA-malware infected networks across the globe. The excellent reporting overlooked one crucial development: constitutional compliance will increasingly be outsourced to algorithms. Meaningful oversight of intelligence practises must address this, or face collateral constitutional…
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When an Ethnographer met Edward Snowden
If you talk about ‘metadata’, ‘big data’ and ‘Big Brother’ just as easily as you order a pizza, ethnography and anthropology are probably not your first points of reference. But the outcome of a recent encounter of ethnographer Tom Boellstorff and Edward Snowden (not IRL but IRP), is that tech policy wonks and researchers should…
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U.S. Citizenship and N.S.A. Surveillance – Legal Safeguard or Practical Backdoor?
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 communications. Currently, U.S. citizens may get some comfort through the usual political discourse that ‘ordinary Americans’ are protected, and this is all about foreigners. In…
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You found a security hole. Now what?
The recent conviction of Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer for identity theft and conspiracy has renewed interest in the question of what researchers should do when they find security vulnerabilities in popular products. See, for example, Matt Blaze’s op-ed on how the research community views these matters, and Weev’s own response. Weev and associates discovered a flaw…
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Don't love the cyber bomb, but don't ignore it either
Cybersecurity is overblown – or not A recent report by Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins of George Mason University titled “Loving The Cyber Bomb? The Dangers Of Threat Inflation In Cybersecurity Policy” has gotten a bit of press. This is an important topic worthy of debate, but I believe their conclusions are incorrect. In this…