[This is a guest post by Wenley Tong, Sebastian Gold, Samuel Gichohi, Mihai Roman, and Jonathan Frankle, undergraduates in the Privacy Technologies seminar that I offered for the second time in Spring 2014. They did an excellent class project on the usability of email encryption.] PGP and similar email encryption standards have existed since the early […]
If Robots Replace Lawyers, Will Politics Calm Down?
June 2, 2014 by
[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
June 2, 2014 by
[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
May 29, 2014 by
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
May 23, 2014 by
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 […]
