Yesterday MIT filed papers asking to intervene in journalist Kevin Poulsen’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking the Secret Service’s records of the agency’s investigation of Aaron Swartz. Poulsen had won a court order requiring the Secret Service to turn over its documents about Aaron, who took his own life while facing aggressive criminal […]
Archives for 2013
Take Over My Dream Job: Associate Director at CITP
Nearly four years ago, I joined the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton as Associate Director. The CITP community is a fantastic collection of smart and funny people who work passionately on all aspects of information technology policy. It was my dream job, so it was bittersweet when I accepted a new job working […]
Regulating Bitcoin
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 business. The letter isn’t important in the grand scheme of things—it’s clear that the Bitcoin Foundation isn’t transmitting money—but it does raise the obvious question […]
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. Our paper looks at the dynamics of Bitcoin, how resilient it would be in the face of attacks, and how Bitcoin is governed. Today I […]
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 more useful ways of searching through the ads. I have written about this in earlier posts, “Dear Craig: Voluntarily Dismiss with Prejudice,” and “A Response […]