Tag: surveillance

  • How Tech is Failing Victims of Intimate Partner Violence: Thomas Ristenpart at CITP

    What technology risks are faced by people who experience intimate partner violence? How is the security community failing them, and what questions might we need to ask to make progress on social and technical interventions? Speaking Tuesday at CITP was Thomas Ristenpart (@TomRistenpart), an associate professor at Cornell Tech and a member of the Department…

  • (Mis)conceptions About the Impact of Surveillance

    Does surveillance impact behavior? Or is its effect, if real, only temporary or trivial? Government surveillance is back in the news thanks to the so-called “Nunes memo”, making this is a perfect time to examine new research on the impact of surveillance. This includes my own recent work, as my doctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute,…

  • AdNauseam, Google, and the Myth of the “Acceptable Ad”

    Earlier this month, we (Helen Nissenbaum, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and I), released a new and improved AdNauseam 3.0. For those not familiar, AdNauseam is the adblocker that clicks every ad in an effort to obfuscate tracking profiles and inject doubt into the lucrative economic system that drives advertising-based surveillance. The 3.0 release contains some new features we’ve been excited to…

  • Brexit Exposes Old and Deepening Data Divide between EU and UK

    After the Brexit vote, politicians, businesses and citizens are all wondering what’s next. In general, legal uncertainty permeates Brexit, but in the world of bits and bytes, Brussels and London have in fact been on a collision course at least since the 90s. The new British prime minister, Theresa May, has been personally responsible for…

  • How is NSA breaking so much crypto?

    There have been rumors for years that the NSA can decrypt a significant fraction of encrypted Internet traffic. In 2012, James Bamford published an article quoting anonymous former NSA officials stating that the agency had achieved a “computing breakthrough” that gave them “the ability to crack current public encryption.” The Snowden documents also hint at…

  • How cookies can be used for global surveillance

    Today we present an updated version of our paper [0] examining how the ubiquitous use of online tracking cookies can allow an adversary conducting network surveillance to target a user or surveil users en masse.  In the initial version of the study, summarized below, we examined the technical feasibility of the attack. Now we’ve made the…

  • Expert Panel Report: A New Governance Model for Communications Security?

    Today, the vulnerable state of electronic communications security dominates headlines across the globe, while surveillance, money and power increasingly permeate the ‘cybersecurity’ policy arena. With the stakes so high, how should communications security be regulated? Deirdre Mulligan (UC Berkeley), Ashkan Soltani (independent, Washington Post), Ian Brown (Oxford) and Michel van Eeten (TU Delft) weighed in on…

  • Wickr: Putting the “non” in anonymity

    [Let’s welcome new CITP blogger Pete Zimmerman, a first-year graduate student in the computer security group at Princeton. — Arvind Narayanan] Following the revelations of wide-scale surveillance by US intelligence agencies and their allies, a myriad of services offering end-to-end encrypted communications have cropped up to take advantage of the increasing demand for privacy from surveillance.…

  • Cookies that give you away: The surveillance implications of web tracking

    [Today we have another announcement of an exciting new research paper. Undergraduate Dillon Reisman, for his senior thesis, applied our web measurement platform to study some timely questions. -Arvind Narayanan] Over the past three months we’ve learnt that NSA uses third-party tracking cookies for surveillance (1, 2). These cookies, provided by a third-party advertising or analytics network…