Tag: Privacy
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Recording
Yesterday I started a thread on new wiretapping technologies, and their policy implications. Today I want to talk about how we should deal with the ability of governments to record and store huge numbers of intercepted messages. In the old days, before there were huge, cheap digital storage devices, government would record an intercepted message…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping
The revelation that the National Security Agency has been wiretapping communications crossing the U.S. border (and possibly within the U.S.), without warrants, has started many angry conversations across the country, and rightly so. Here is an issue that challenges our most basic conception of the purposes of government and its relation to citizens. Today I…
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Guns vs. Random Bits
Last week Tim Wu gave an interesting lecture here at Princeton – the first in our infotech policy lecture series – entitled “Who Controls the Internet?”, based on his recent book of the same title, co-authored with Jack Goldsmith. In the talk, Tim argued that national governments will have a larger role than most people…
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Facebook and the Campus Cops
An interesting mini-controversy developed at Princeton last week over the use of the Facebook.com web site by Princeton’s Public Safety officers (i.e., the campus police). If you’re not familiar with Facebook, you must not be spending much time on a college campus. Facebook is a sort of social networking site for college students, faculty and…
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NYU/Princeton Spyware Workshop Liveblog
Today I’m at the NYU/Princeton spyware workshop. I’ll be liveblogging the workshop here. I won’t give you copious notes on what each speaker says, just a list of things that strike me as interesting. Videos of the presentations will be available on the net eventually. I gave a basic tutorial on spyware last night, to…
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RFID Virus Predicted
Melanie Rieback, Bruno Crispo, and Andy Tanenbaum have a new paper describing how RFID tags might be used to propagate computer viruses. This has garnered press coverage, including a John Markoff story in today’s New York Times. The underlying technical argument is pretty simple. An RFID tag is a tiny device, often affixed to a…
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RIAA Says Future DRM Might "Threaten Critical Infrastructure and Potentially Endanger Lives"
We’re in the middle of the U.S. Copyright Office’s triennial DMCA exemption rulemaking. As you might expect, most of the filings are dry as dust, but buried in the latest submission by a coalition of big copyright owners (publishers, Authors’ Guild, BSA, MPAA, RIAA, etc.) is an utterly astonishing argument. Some background: In light of…
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Mistrust-Based DRM
Randy Picker has an interesting post on the Chicago Law Faculty blog, describing what he calls “mistrust-based DRM”. The idea is that when an online music store gives you a song, it embeds into the song a watermark that contains your credit card number, or some other information that would let a (dishonest) person spend…
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Sony CD DRM Paper Released
Today Alex and I released our paper about the Sony CD DRM episode. This is the full, extended version of the paper, with a bunch of new material that hasn’t been published or posted before. As an experiment, we posted draft sections of the paper here and asked readers for comments and feedback. The experiment…
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Secure Flight Mothballed
Secure Flight, the planned next-generation system for screening airline passengers, has been mothballed by the Transportation Security Administration, according to an AP story by Leslie Miller. TSA chief Kip Hawley cited security concerns and questions about the program’s overall direction. Last year I served on the Secure Flight Working Group, a committee of outside technology…