May 17, 2024

"Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution", the NSA Statement, and Our Response

CBS News and a host of other outlets have covered my new paper with Sharon Goldberg, Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution: Warrantless Bulk Surveillance on Americans by Collecting Network Traffic Abroad. We’ll present the paper on July 18 at HotPETS [slides, pdf], right after a keynote by Bill Binney (the NSA whistleblower), and at TPRC […]

Will Greenwald's New Book Reveal How to Conduct Warrantless Bulk Surveillance on Americans from Abroad?

Tomorrow, Glenn Greenwald’s highly anticipated book ‘No Place to Hide’ goes on sale. Apart from personal accounts on working with whisteblower Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and elsewhere, Mr. Greenwald announced that he will reveal new surveillance operations by Western intelligence agencies. In the last weeks, Sharon Goldberg and I have been finishing a paper […]

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 […]

Secure protocols for accountable warrant execution

Last week the press reported that the White House will seek to redesign the NSA’s mass phone call data program, so that data will be held by the phone companies and accessed by the NSA, subject to a new warrant requirement. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will issue the warrants. Today Josh Kroll and I, […]

9 Problems of Government Hacking: Why IT-Systems Deserve Constitutional Protection

Governments around the world are increasingly hacking into IT-systems. But for every apparent benefit, government hacking creates deeper problems. Time to unpack 9 of them, and to discuss one unique perspective: in response to a proposed hacking law in 2008, the German Constitutional Court created a new human right protecting the ‘confidentiality and integrity of […]