For those who didn’t want to sit through the full panel, here’s an eight minute excerpt:

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It’s something of a cliche among privacy researchers that “anonymity loves company“: Anonymizing mix networks (e.g. Tor) are more secure and more anonymous the more people are using them. Glossing the geekalicious details, the basic idea is lots of different encrypted communications, going to and from lots of different people, get chopped, scrambled, and sent […]

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One more thought about Chris Soghoian’s great post from last week on telecoms and surveillance. The government is able to get an enormous amount of information about your online activity—short of actually reading your e-mails—using tools like National Security Letters and pen/trap orders, which don’t require the showing of “probable cause” required by the Fourth […]

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It’s been a good week for document dumps—especially if you’re interested in surveillance policy. On top of Chris Soghoian’s revelations about telecom location tracking requests and a slew of leaked telecom and social networking site surveillance manuals for law enforcement at Cryptome, I’ve also been poring over the FOIA documents on cell phone lojacking obtained […]

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I had half forgotten until last week’s Cato forum how much I enjoy a good live debate, but it does invariably mean you spending the next couple days thinking of points you wish you’d made—either because they didn’t occur to you, or because there just wasn’t time to get through everything you scribbled down while […]

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I’m going back over the transcripts from last week’s PATRIOT hearings and still a little gobsmacked by the shameless stupidity of the remarks from grown men who actually get to decide what the law will be.  Remember, this isn’t what they say to the rubes from the stump; it’s how they talk to each other […]

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Last week, the House Judiciary Committee marked up its version of a bill to reauthorize and reform some expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.  Plenty of interesting things happened there, and I’ll write about them elsewhere.  But I want to try to draw some special attention to a rather subtle change I only just […]

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xI’ve been debating the Heritage Foundation’s Jena Baker McNeill on the USA PATRIOT Act over at the LA Times all week: You can check out round one and round two, with the final bout scheduled for this afternoon. It’s frankly been a bit frustrating so far—I think it’s telling that PATRIOT defenders are so reluctant […]

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I’ve got one of a bunch of letters in the Sunday Washington Post objecting to their facile editorial on PATRIOT Act renewal, which weirdly asserted that a “reasonable balance” is struck by a bill that reauthorizes surveillance powers almost unaltered. My original letter, incidentally, had somewhat more pointedly said that the Post “duly transcribed” the […]

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