Tag: Privacy
-
21st Century Wiretapping: Risk of Abuse
Today I’m returning, probably for the last time, to the public policy questions surrounding today’s wiretapping technology. Thus far in the series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) I have described how technology enables wiretapping based on automated recognition of certain features of a message (rather than individualized suspicion of a person), I…
-
Syndromic Surveillance: 21st Century Data Harvesting
[This article was written by a pseudonymous reader who calls him/herself Enigma Foundry. I’m publishing it here because I think other readers would find it interesting. – Ed Felten] The recent posts about 21st Century Wiretapping described a government program which captured, stored, filtered and analyzed large quantities of information, information which the government had…
-
The Exxon Valdez of Privacy
Recently I moderated a panel discussion, at Princeton Reunions, about “Privacy and Security in the Digital Age”. When the discussion turned to public awareness of privacy and data leaks, one of the panelists said that the public knows about this issue but isn’t really mobilized, because we haven’t yet seen “the Exxon Valdez of privacy”…
-
Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Content-Based Suspicion
Yesterday I argued that allowing police to record all communications that are flagged by some automated algorithm might be reasonable, if the algorithm is being used to recognize the voice of a person believed (for good reason) to be a criminal. My argument, in part, was that that kind of wiretapping would still be consistent…
-
Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Recognition
For the past several weeks I’ve been writing, on and off, about how technology enables new types of wiretapping, and how public policy should cope with those changes. Having laid the groundwork (1; 2; 3; 4; 5) we’re now ready for to bite into the most interesting question. Suppose the government is running, on every…
-
Art of Science, and Princeton Privacy Panel
Today I want to recommend two great things happening at Princeton, one of which is also on the Net. Princeton’s second annual Art of Science exhibit was unveiled recently, and it’s terrific, just like last year. Here’s some background, from the online exhibit: In the spring of 2006 we again asked the Princeton University community…
-
Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Your Dog Sees You Naked
Suppose the government were gathering information about your phone calls: who you talked to, when, and for how long. If that information were made available to human analysts, your privacy would be impacted. But what if the information were made available only to computer algorithms? A similar question arose when Google introduced its Gmail service.…
-
Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Storing Communications Data
Today I want to continue the post-series about new technology and wiretapping (previous posts: 1, 2, 3), by talking about what is probably the simplest case, involving gathering and storage of data by government. Recall that I am not considering what is legal under current law, which is an important issue but is beyond my…
-
Zfone Encrypts VoIP Calls
Phil Zimmerman, who created the PGP encryption software, and faced a government investigation as a result, now offers a new program, Zfone, that provides end-to-end encryption of computer-to-computer (VoIP) phone calls, according to a story in yesterday’s New York Times. One of the tricky technical problems in encrypting communications is key exchange: how to get…
-
Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Not So Hypothetical
Two weeks ago I started a series of posts (so far: 1, 2) about how new technologies change the policy issues around government wiretapping. I argued that technology changed the policy equation in two ways, by making storage much cheaper, and by enabling fancy computerized analyses of intercepted communications. My plan was to work my…