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Trust: Ill-Advised in a Digital Age
From ACM Opinion

Trust: Ill-Advised in a Digital Age

Bruce Schneieer ordered a Coke, no ice, at the Rio casino on a Saturday afternoon. I ordered Diet Coke, also no ice, and handed the bartender an American Express...

The Frightening Things You Hear at a Black Hat Conference
From ACM Opinion

The Frightening Things You Hear at a Black Hat Conference

Here is a look at some of the highlights and scarier happenings taking place at the annual Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas last week.

From ACM Opinion

The Public Is Left in the Dark When Courts Allow Electronic Surveillance

A big part of Magistrate Judge Stephen W. Smith's job in Federal District Court in Houston is to consider law enforcement requests for cellphone and email records...

From ACM Opinion

The End of Privacy?

Cellphones, email, and online social networking have come to rule daily life, but Congress has done nothing to update federal privacy laws to better protect digital...

A Weapon We Can't Control
From ACM Opinion

A Weapon We Can't Control

The decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility late in George W. Bush's presidency...

Why Attack When We Can't Defend?
From ACM Opinion

Why Attack When We Can't Defend?

In December 2010, after we had reverse engineered the Stuxnet virus, I argued that the attackers must have known they would open Pandora's box. Others suggested...

Following the Breadcrumbs on the Data-Sharing Trail
From ACM Opinion

Following the Breadcrumbs on the Data-Sharing Trail

Would you like to donate to the Obama campaign? Sign up for a college course? Or maybe subscribe to Architectural Digest? 

From ACM Opinion

From the Birthplace of Big Brother

The George W. Bush team must be consumed with envy. Britain's government is preparing sweeping new legislation that would let the country's domestic intelligence...

How China Steals Our Secrets
From ACM Opinion

How China Steals Our Secrets

For the last two months, senior government officials and private-sector experts have paraded before Congress and described in alarming terms a silent threat: cyberattacks...

A High-Tech War on Leaks
From ACM Opinion

A High-Tech War on Leaks

Back in 2006, before the Obama administration made leak prosecutions routine, a panel of three federal appeals court judges in New York struggled to decide whether...

From ACM Opinion

Facebook Is Using You

Last week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion...

From ACM Opinion

Privacy, Technology, and Law

Every day, those of us who live in the digital world give little bits of ourselves away. On Facebook and LinkedIn. To servers that store our email, Google searches...

Beyond Sopa
From ACM Opinion

Beyond Sopa

We welcomed the collapse this month of two flawed bills to prevent online piracy, bills that could have stifled speech and undermined Internet safety. But piracy...

From ACM Opinion

Internet Access Is Not a Human Right

From the streets of Tunis to Tahrir Square and beyond, protests around the world last year were built on the Internet and the many devices that interact with...

From ACM Opinion

The Future of Moral Machines

A robot walks into a bar and says, "I’ll have a screwdriver." A bad joke, indeed. But even less funny if the robot says "Give me what’s in your cash register."...

From ACM Opinion

The Court's Gps Test

There were no GPS tracking devices when the framers wrote the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches. But that does not mean this sometimes...

From ACM Opinion

Protect Our Right to Anonymity

In November, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could redefine the scope of privacy in an age of increasingly ubiquitous surveillance technologies...

Bike Crash Wiped Details; Gps Data Filled Them In
From ACM News

Bike Crash Wiped Details; Gps Data Filled Them In

After racing and biking back roads on the San Francisco Peninsula for almost half a century without serious incident, on July 3 I crashed while riding downhill...

From ACM News

Decoding Your Email Personality

Imagine, if you will, a young Mark Zuckerberg circa 2003, tapping out mail messages from his Harvard dorm room. It's a safe bet he never would have guessed that...

From ACM Opinion

Free to Search and Seize

This spring was a rough season for the Fourth Amendment.
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