April 28, 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 […]

Why King George III Can Encrypt

[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 […]

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 […]

Bitcoin hacks and thefts: The underlying reason

Emin Gün Sirer has a fascinating post about how the use of NoSQL caused technical failures that led to the demise of Bitcoin exchanges Flexcoin and Poloniex. But these are only the latest in a long line of hacks of exchanges, other services, and individuals; a wide variety of bugs have been implicated. This suggests […]

New Research: Cheating on Exams with Smartwatches

A Belgian university recently banned all watches from exams due to the possibility of smartwatches being used to cheat. Similarly, some standardized tests in the U.S. like the GRE have banned all digital watches. These policies seems prudent, since today’s smartwatches could be used to smuggle in notes or even access websites during the test. However, their potential use […]