Computers, Privacy & the Constitution
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Computers, Privacy, & the Constitution

Professor Eben Moglen

Columbia Law School, Spring 2013

My office hours are Thursdays 11-1 and 3-4, in JG642, and by arrangement at other times. Please email moglen@columbia.edu for an appointment, or consult my assistant, Mark Drake, at 212-461-1905.

Tech project 1: Create a GPG key and upload it to the keyservers

Details and instructions

Technology project 2: Better browsing control

Details and instructions

Introduction to the NSA surveillance apparatus

Part 1: Prisms, internet giants, and James Bond

Part 2: Distilling Our Data

Part 3: Sharing is caring

Part 4: Technology of Power

Summary by IanSullivan

See also "NSA Domestic Spying Program" section of PartFour.

On The Radar

Julian Assange, Who Should Own the Internet?, New York Times, December 4, 2014

Shelby Sebens, Crackdown on Oregon License Plates Raises Privacy Concerns, GoLocalPDX, September 04, 2014

Alejandro Llorente et al, Social media fingerprints of unemployment, arXiv:1411.3140, November 12, 2014

Brent Skorup, Cops scan social media to help assess your ‘threat rating’, Reuters Blog, December 12, 2014

People Love Spying On One Another: A Q & A With Facebook Critic Eben Moglen, Washington Post, November 19, 2014

Eben Moglen, The GCHQ boss’s assault on privacy is promoting illegality on the net, The Guardian, November 13, 2014

Event: 1971 Screening and Discussion on Surveillance November 7, 2014, Davis Auditorium

Devlin Barrett & Danny Yadron, New Level of Smartphone Encryption Alarms Law Enforcement, Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2014

atockar, Riding with the Stars: Passenger Privacy in the NYC Taxicab Dataset, Neustar Research, September 15, 2014

Eugene Mandel, How the Napa earthquake affected Bay area sleepers, Jawbone.com Blog, August 25, 2014

Al Sassco, Fitness Trackers are Changing Online Privacy — and It's Time to Pay Attention, CIO.com, August 14, 2014

Tom Warren, Microsoft, like Google, tips off police for child porn arrest, The Verge, August 7, 2014

Douglas MacMillan, Foursquare Now Tracks Users Even When the App Is Closed, Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2014

Vindu Goel, How Facebook Sold You Krill Oil, New York Times, August 2, 2014

Jennifer Valentino-Devries and Siobhan Gorman, Secret Court's Redefinition of 'Relevant' Empowered Vast NSA Data-Gathering, Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2013

Philip Dorling, Snowden reveals Australia's links to US spy web, The Age, July 8, 2013

Christian Stöcker, GCHQ Surveillance: The Power of Britain's Data Vacuum, Der Spiegel, July 07, 2013

Tom Hays, NYC cases show crooked cops' abuse of FBI database, Yahoo News, July 7, 2013

Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima, Agreements with private companies protect U.S. access to cables’ data for surveillance, The Washington Post, July 6, 2013

cgh with wire reports, Snowden Search: Bolivia Irate over Forced Landing, Der Spiegel, July 03, 2013

cgh, Guardian Report: US Engaged in Vast Spying Operation on Europe, Der Spiegel, July 01, 2013

Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Fidelius Schmid, and Holger Stark, Attacks from America: NSA Spied on European Union Offices, Der Spiegel, June 29, 2013

Glenn Greenwald, Fisa court oversight: a look inside a secret and empty process, The Guardian, June 20, 2013

James Risen and Nick Wingfield, Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders, The New York Times, June 19, 2013

Tim Wu, Why Monopolies Make Spying Easier, The New Yorker, June 18, 2013

Spiegel Staff, The German Prism: Berlin Wants to Spy Too, Spiegel Online International, June 17, 2013

Ewen MacAskill, Nick Davies, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger, and James Ball, GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at G20 summits, The Guardian, June 16, 2013

Stephen Braun, Anne Flaherty, Jack Gillum, and Matt Apuzzo, Secret to Prism program: Even bigger data seizure, Associated Press, June 15, 2013

Michael Riley, U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms, Bloomberg News, June 15, 2013

Barton Gellman, U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of revealing Internet, phone metadata, Washington Post, June 15, 2013

Tim Mak. Dianne Feinstein: NSA needs no court to query database, Politico, June 13, 2013

Colin Freeze, Data-collection program got green light from MacKay in 2011, The Globe and Mail, June 10, 2013

Glenn Greenwald, NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal, The Guardian, June 6, 2013

Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, Washington Post, June 6, 2013

Glenn Greenwald, NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily, The Guardian, June 5, 2013

Arvind Narayanan, Reidentification as Basic Science, 33 bits of entropy, May 27, 2013

Torben Olander, In Denmark, Online Tracking of Citizens is an Unwieldy Failure, Tech President, May 22 2013

Ellen Nakashima, Chinese hackers who breached Google gained access to sensitive data, U.S. officials say, The Washington Post, May 20, 2013

Joshua Kopstein, Metadata matters: how phone records and obsolete laws harm privacy and the free press, The Verge, May 16, 2013

The Associated Press, U.S. Secretly Obtains Two Months of A.P. Phone Records, The New York Times, May 13, 2013

Joshua Kopstein, AT&T getting secret immunity from wiretapping laws for government surveillance, The Verge, April 24, 2013

Tom Simonite, Life’s Trajectory Seen Through Facebook Data, MIT Technology Review, April 24, 2013

Steve Lohr, Big Data, Trying to Build Better Workers, The New York Times , April 20, 2013

D.B. Grady, Inside the secret world of America's top eavesdropping spies, The Week, April 12, 2012

Max Fisher, Chinese hackers outed themselves by logging into their personal Facebook accounts, The Washington Post, February 19, 2013

Mathew Ingram, The increasingly blurry line between Big Data and Big Brother, Gigaom.com, February 1, 2013

Alexis C. Madrigal, DARPA's 1.8 Gigapixel Drone Camera Could See You Waving At It From 15,000 Feet, The Atlantic, February 1, 2013

Carl Franzen, Google Reveals How U.S. Government Obtains User Information, Talking Points Memo, January 23, 2013

BBC Staff, Germany orders changes to Facebook real name policy, December 18, 2012

Julia Angwin, U.S. terror agency to tap citizen files, Wall Street Journal (via Yahoo), December 12, 2012

Spencer Ackerman, Oops! Air Force Drones Can Now (Accidentally) Spy on You, Wired, May 8, 2012

Andy Greenberg, These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps, Forbes, April 3, 2012

James Bamford, Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA, Wired, April 3, 2012

BBC Staff, Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws, BBC News, April 1, 2012

Tracy Clark-Flory, Facebook: The next tool in fighting STDs, Slate, March 31,2012

Eric Lichtblau, Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool, New York Times, March 31, 2012

Charlie Savage, U.S. Relaxes Limits on Use of Data in Terror Analysis, New York Times, March 22, 2012

Laurie Segall, Facebook strips 'privacy' from new 'data use' policy, CNN Money, March 22, 2012

Darlene Storm, Shocker: NSA Chief denies Total Information Awareness spying on Americans, blog.computerworld.com, March 21, 2012

James Bamford, The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say), Wired, March 15, 2012

Julian Dibbell, The Shadow Web, Scientific American, March 2012

Bob Sullivan, Govt. agencies, colleges demand applicants' Facebook passwords, MSNBC, March 6, 2012

Matt Alexander, AT&T Plan Would Let App Makers Pay for Subscribers' Data Use, One37.net, February 27, 2012

NewsCore, Facebook spies on phone users' text messages, report says , News.com.au, February 26, 2012

Sean Gallagher, FBI turns off 3,000 GPS trackers after Supreme Court ruling, ars technica, February 26, 2012

David Carr, Blurred Line Between Espionage and Truth, New York Times, February 26, 2012

Charles Duhigg, How Companies Learn Your Secrets, New York Times, February 16, 2012

Julian Borger and Charles Arthur, Twitter users threaten boycott over censorship accusation, The Guardian, January 27, 2012

Sebastian Anthony, Google is FUBAR, ExtremeTech, January 25, 2012

Jim Giles, FBI releases plans to monitor social networks, New Scientist, January 25, 2012

Robert Barnes, Supreme Court: Warrants needed in GPS tracking, Washington Post, January 23, 2012

EPIC, FOIA Documents Reveal Homeland Security is Monitoring Political Dissent, EPIC, January 13, 2012

Katitza Rodriguez, Biometrics in Argentina: Mass Surveillance as a State Policy, EFF, January 10, 2012

David Kravets, No Warrant Needed for GPS Monitoring, Judge Rules, Wired, January 3, 2012

Tim Mak, AP: CIA eyes up to 5M tweets a day, Politico, November 4, 2011

John Markoff, Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’, NY Times, October 10, 2011

Mike Elgan, Snooping: It's not a crime, it's a feature, Computer World, April 16, 2011

Mike Masnick, Replay Six Months Of A German Politician's Life Thanks To His Mobile Phone Data, TechDirt, Mar 29th 2011

djwm, Cree.py application knows where you've been, H-Online, March 30, 2011

Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain, Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media, The Guardian, March 17, 2011

Readings

The seminar will address topics on the following themes. We will be building on and updating the linked reference materials in the upcoming weeks so keep an eye on the work in this section.

In addition to the on-line material contained or linked here, we will be reading Robert O'Harrow's book No Place to Hide (2006), which should be available at the Columbia bookstore, and can also be bought from, for example, Amazon.

A Word on Technology Old and New About the Word

This seminar is an attempt to learn about, understand and predict the development of law in a rapidly changing area. We must assemble the field of knowledge relevant to our questions even as we begin trying to answer them. Wiki technology is an ideal match for the work we have in hand. Below you will find an introduction to this particular wiki, or TWiki, where you can learn as much or as little about how this technology works as you want.

For now, the most important thing is just that any page of the wiki has an edit button, and your work in the course consists of writings that we will collaboratively produce here. You can make new pages, edit existing pages, attach files to any page, add links, leave comments in the comment boxes--whatever in your opinion adds to a richer dialog. During the semester I will assign writing exercises, which will also be posted here. All of everyone's work contributes to a larger and more informative whole, which is what our conversation is informed by, and helps us to understand.

Please begin by registering. I look forward to seeing you at our first meeting on the 17th.

Introduction to the CompPrivConst Web

The CompPrivConst site is a collaborative class space built on Twiki [twiki.org], a free software wiki system. If this is your first time using a wiki for a long term project, or first time using a wiki at all, you might want to take a minute and look around this site. If you see something on the page that you don't know how to create in a wiki, take a look at the text that produced it using the "Edit" button at the top of each page, and feel free to try anything out in the Sandbox.

All of the Twiki documentation is also right at hand. Follow the TWiki link in the sidebar. There are a number of good tutorials and helpful FAQs there explaining the basics of what a wiki does, how to use Twiki, and how to format text.

From TWiki's point of view, this course, Computers, Privacy, & the Constitution, is one "web." There are other webs here: the sandbox for trying wiki experiments, for example, and my other courses, etc. You're welcome to look around in those webs too, of course. Below are some useful tools for dealing with this particular web of ours. You can see the list of recent changes, and you can arrange to be notified of changes, either by email or by RSS feed. I would strongly recommend that you sign up for one or another form of notification; if not, it is your responsibility to keep abreast of the changes yourself.

Misc.

CompPrivConst Web Utilities

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r187 - 14 Jan 2015 - 22:48:58 - IanSullivan
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