October 9, 2024

If Robots Replace Lawyers, Will Politics Calm Down?

[TL;DR: Probably not.] A recent essay from law professor John McGinnis, titled “Machines v. Lawyers,” explores how machine learning and other digital technologies may soon reshape the legal profession, and by extension, how they may change the broader national policy debate in which lawyers play such key roles. His topic and my life seem closely related: After law […]

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. […]

Increasing Civic Engagement Requires Understanding Why People Have Chosen Not to Participate

Last month, I was a poll watcher for the mayoral primary in Washington, DC. My duties were to monitor several polling places to confirm that each Precinct Captain was ensuring that the City’s election laws were being followed on site; in particular, that everyone who believed that they were qualified to vote was able to […]

Threshold signatures and Bitcoin wallet security: A menu of options

Before Bitcoin can mature as a currency, the security of wallets must be improved. Previously, I motivated the need for sharing Bitcoin wallets using threshold signatures as a means to greatly increase their resilience to theft. For corporate users, threshold signatures enable cryptographically secure access control. For individuals, threshold signatures can be used to build […]

Free Law Project Partnering in Stewardship of RECAP

More than five years ago, I spoke at CITP about the US Federal Courts electronic access system called PACER. I noted that despite centuries of precedent stating that the public should have access to the law as openly and freely as possible, the courts were charging unreasonable rates for access to the public record. As […]