Doors of Perception

Fourteen top cryptographers and computer scientists have issued a paper detailing why American and British government demands for mandatory “back doors” to encrypted software won’t work and would undermine computer security, just in time for a Senate Judiciary committee hearing on the subject, Nicole Perloth reports for the New York Times. The same group, she notes, helped defeat the “Clipper chip” proposal of the Clinton Administration during the height of the “crypto wars” of the late 1990s.

Writing in Just Security, the Open Technology Institute’s Kevin Bankston reminds us that all the concerns being voiced now by people like FBI Director James Comey about how growing use of strong encryption will block law enforcement’s ability to conduct investigations—the so-called “Going Dark” problem—were also voiced twenty years ago during the “crypto wars,” and despite the anti-crypto’s side losing then, we are living in a “Golden Age for Surveillance” for the government. He writes, “Even with the proliferation of encryption, law enforcement has access to much more information than ever before: access to cellphone location information about where we are and where we’ve been, metadata about who we communicate with and when, and vast databases of emails and pictures and more in the cloud.”

Cora Currier and Morgan Marquis-Boire of The Intercept have published more details of Hacking Team’s dealings with a range of repressive clients, including the Turkish National Police, Ethiopia’s Information Network Security Agency, the Moroccan government, and Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Service.

The Sunlight Foundation’s Nicko Margolies shares a Hillary Clinton house-party planning guide obtained by Sunlight’s Political Party Time project and notes that it says that “the single most important thing you can do for the campaign and for Hillary” is to “enter your data” about the party attendees at “www.hillaryclinton.com/data.”

Techies for Hillary: Former Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly and Jennifer Carrico, former Counsel of YouTube, are hosting a fundraiser for Clinton at their home in Atherton, California, on August 5.

The Huffington Post’s Alexander Howard zings the Department of Homeland Security for launching a new mobile app for making Freedom of Information Act requests that actually “made the experience of submitting one worse.” He adds, “Frankly, a user would be much better served using MuckRock.com to make and track a FOIA request.”

Brave New Algorithmic World: A research team at Carnegie Mellon University created a set of fake user accounts with identical search histories, but found that “when Google presumed users to be male job seekers, they were much more likely to be shown ads for high-paying executive jobs,” Julie Carpenter reports for the Washington Post. Google says the differential effect may be due to choices made by advertisers.

What is video for change? Tanya Notley, Andrew Lowenthal, and Sam Gregory have published a very interesting working paper, condensing their ongoing research into what makes it a “unique media-making and social change field,” the ethics of its practice, and the challenge of defining and evaluating its impacts appropriately. The authors are seeking comments on their work in progress.

A new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York says New York’s tech boom is real, especially if you focus on those industries that use tech as their core business strategy, Greg David reports for Crain’s New York Business.

Aaron Zamost of Square has written a delightful guide to the Silicon Valley cycle of hype, which just about anyone at any start-up or tech company can relate to.