Special bonus: This article contains two puzzles for the reader, marked in green. Try to solve them yourself before reading the solutions in a future post! In my last post I described a particularly efficient kind of risk-limiting audit (RLA) of election results: ballot-level comparison audits, which rely on a unique serial number on every […]
Archives for 2020
Ballot-level comparison audits: central-count
March 4, 2020 by
All voting machines these days are computers, and any voting machine that is a computer can be hacked to cheat. The widely accepted solution is to use voting machines to count paper ballots, and do Risk-Limiting Audits: random-sample inspections of those paper ballots to ensure (with a guaranteed level of assurance) that the election outcome […]
CITP Tech Policy Boot Camp 2019
February 3, 2020 by
[This post was written by Liza Paudel, MPA’21 and Allison Huang, History’20.] Over Fall Break, the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) hosted 17 current students on a two-day tech policy bootcamp in Washington D.C. The group was a mix of undergraduate and graduate students from various disciplines including Computer Science, Public Policy, Economics, and […]
Improving Protections for Children’s Privacy Online
January 15, 2020 by
CITP’s Tech Policy Clinic submitted a Comment to the Federal Trade Commission in connection with its review of the COPPA Rule to protect children’s privacy online. Our Comment explains why it is important to update the COPPA Rule to keep it current with new privacy risks, especially as children spend increasing amounts of time online […]
The Unknown History of Digital Cash
January 7, 2020 by
How could we create “a digital equivalent to cash, something that could be created but not forged, exchanged but not copied, and which reveals nothing about its users”? Why would we need this digital currency? Dr. Finn Brunton, Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, discussed his new book Digital Cash: […]
