CSCI 494: Preparation for Mar. 1

I have had difficulty finding good overview articles to cover matters related to government and privacy: many of the issues have been treated much more in the general press than in the technical literature.

From the readings for and class meeting on February 22, we should get a better handle on what privacy is and what is important about it. As we turn our attention from private sector to government, we find that the following broad areas have generated controversy:

eavesdropping (interception of communications between other parties)
surveillance (collection of information about movement and activities)
identification and data disclosure requirements
analysis of data collected for other purposes
- combining government records (“record matching”)
- combining and searching data from commercial as well as government sources (“data mining”)

There are some related topics that touch on these. For example, the regulation of cryptography is significant to both eavesdropping and surveilance.

The following are matters of recent or current interest; you may find online materials through the usual search engines, through advocacy sites, or through the library’s search databases.

Total (or Terrorist) Information Awareness, a scrapped program
Automated Targeting Systems (and its predecessors CAPPS II and Secure Flight)
the REAL ID act, and other national-id schemes
public and private surveillance cameras, possibly augmented with computerized face-recognition
Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)
the FBI’s Carnivore program
RFID tags, on property and in passports and other ID documents

Your assignment is to find and read at least three current (not more than 3 years old) news articles that together touch on at least two of these issues–either broad topics or specific matters such as those above. In addition, you need to read at least one background/overview article (longer than a page). When you submit your responses to readings, you should list what you have read: give full citation information, or, for selections below, the tag.

If you want some interesting historical perspective, there were articles in CACM around the time that the federal government began to use “record matching”, and around the time that CALEA was passed. The following are either readily available online, or have a copy in the folder marked “CSCI 494” in the Brandt room (where the books were previously shelved). Most of these articles would qualify as background reading. (These all now appear on the class readings page, too.)

[D⁺93]: Dorothy E. Denning et al. To tap or not to tap. Communications of the ACM, 36(3):24–44, March 1993.
[Cla88]: Roger Clarke. Information technology and dataveillance. Communications of the ACM, 31(5):498-512, May 1988.
[Giv02]: Beth Givens. Public records on the Internet: the privacy dilemma. Proceeings of the 12th Annual Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, ACM, April 2002.
[Gra02]: Jennifer Granick. Sowing the seeds of surveillance. Wired News, January 31, 2007. http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72608-0.html
[Kus84]: Richard P. Kusserow. The government needs computer matching to root out waste and fraud. Communications of the ACM, 27(6):542-545, June 1984.
[Man02]: Charles C. Mann. Homeland insecurity. Atlantic Monthly, 290(2):81–102, September 2002. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/09/mann.htm
[NW01]: Peter G. Neumann and Lauren Weinstein. Risks of national identity cards. Communications of the ACM, 44(12):176, December 2001.
[Sal68]: G. Salton. Editorial: On the future of mechanical infomration files. Communications of the ACM, 11(1):2, January 1968.
[Sha84]: John Shattuck. Computer matching is a serious threat to individual rights. Communications of the ACM, 27(6):538-541, June 1984.
[Tav96]: Herman T. Tavani. Computer matching and personal privacy: Can they be compatible? Proceeings of the 1996 Symposium on Computers and the Quality of Life, ACM SIGCAS, February 1996.

In addition, the following web sites might be helpful:

PRIVACY Forum: A moderated mailing list similar to RISKS Digest, but dealing with privacy issues. http://www.vortex.com/privacy/
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF): http://www.eff.org/
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC): http://www.epic.org/

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.