ECS 189L – Cryptography and Surveillance – Spring 2020

Announcements

• I have cancelled this class. I wrote a fairly long note to explain why and to apologize for the inconvenience.
• I am putting out some of the material that I had started to gather for this class. It is highly fragmentary.

Basic course information

• The course-information sheet would have had all the key information
• Zoom meetings
• The schedule and assignments will grows with each class
• The course flyer I had made up
• My office hours are on my personal homepage

Resources

Related classes

• Crypto for Social Good (Seny Kamara, Brown)
• Communications Security and Social Movements (Glencora Borradaile, OSU)
• My own ECS 127 (Phillip Rogaway, UCD)
• My own ECS 188 (Phillip Rogaway, UCD)
• Cryptography I ( Dan Boneh, Stanford)

Some readings (not on crypto)

• The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (Phillip Rogaway, 2015)
• You and the Atomic Bomb (George Orwell, 1945) (thin connection?)
• Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization (Shoshana Zuboff, 2015)
• You are Now Remotely Controlled (Shoshana Zuboff, 2020)
• Lessons Learned Too Well: Anonymity in a Time of Surveillance (A. Michael Froomkin, 2017)
• When Robot Eyes are Watching You: The Law & Policy of Automated Communications Surveillance (Keven S. Bankston and Amie Stepanovich, 2014)
• The Price of Hypocracy (Evgeny Morozov, 2013)
• The Data that Turned the World Upsdie Down: How Cambridge Analytica used your Facebood data to help the Donald Trump campaign in the 2016 election (Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, 2017)
• Discipline and Punish (short selection from the book) (Michel Foucault, 1975)
• The Transparent Society (short selection from the book) (David Brin, 1996)
• `The intelligence coup of the century': For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communication of allies and adversaries (Greg Miller, 2020); and As the U.S. spied on the world, the CIA and NSA bickered (Greg Miller, 2020)
• Drone Theory (short selection from the book) (Gregoire Chamayou, 2015)
• Talking with Vula (Tim Jenkin, 1995) (Also Escape from Pretoria (2020) (Francis Annan, 2020))
• Some artciles from the Snowden revelations: Verizon (2013.06.2013), FISA courts (2013.06.20), NSA data mining (2013.06.27), Bugging Europe (2013.06.30), Microsoft (2013.07.11), PRISM (2013.07.07), How spy agencies defeat security mechanisms (2013.09.06).
• A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (John Perry Barlow, 1996)
• A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (Eric Hughes, 1993)
• The Fate of Internet (John Naughton, 2013)
• Taking back the Internet (Bruce Schneier, 2013)
• Information Consumerism (Evgeny Morozov, 2013)
• Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization (Shoshana Zuboff, 2015)
• Administration response on telephone metadata collection (2013.08.09), PCLOB Report on PRISM/Upstream surveillance,
• Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images (Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang, 2016)
• The Paranoid State (Sarah Kendzior, 2013)
• The Transparent Society (David Brin, 1996)
• Against Transparency (Lawrence Lessig, 2013)
• The Data That Turned the World Upside Down (Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, 2017)
• Bodies in Seats (Casey Newton, 2019) and The Trauma Floor (Casey Newton, 2019)
• `The Intelligence Coup of the Century' (Greg Miller, 2020) and As the USA spied on the world, the CIA and NSA bickered (Gerg Miller, 2020)

Some crypto readings (just started; lower-layer crypto from my own notes; see my ecs127 materials)

• Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete (David Chaum, 1981)
• Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson, 2004)
• Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System (Clarke, Sandberg, Wiley, and Hong, )
• Website Fingerprinting at Internet Scale (Panchenko et al., 2016)
• Virtual or virtueless? The evolution of money in the digital age (Yves Mersch, 2018)

Films

• The Conversation (1974) (Francis Ford Coppola, 113 mins)
• Minority Report (2002) (Steven Spielberg, 145 mins)
• 1971 (2014) (Johanna Hamilton, 79 mins)
• 1984 (1985) (Michael Radford, 110 mins)
• Black Mirror Episodes: The Entire History of You (2011), Be Right Back (2013), and Nosedive (2016)
• We Are Legion: Story of Hacktivists (2012) (Brian Knappenberger, 94 mins)
• The Fifth Estate (2013) (Bill Condon, 128 mins) or We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013) (Alex Gibney, 130 mins)
• Citizenfour (2014) (Laura Poitras, 113 mins)
• The Great Hack (2019) (Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, 114 mins)
• 5000 Feet is the Best (2011) (Omer Fast, 30 mins)
• The Vula Connection (2014) (Marion Edmunds, 58 mins)
• The Social Dilemma (2020) (Jeff Orlowski, 94 mins)

Videos

• Cambridge Analytica — The Power of Big Data Psychographics (Alexander Nix, 2016, 11 mins)
• Facebook's role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy (Carole Cadwalladr, 2019)
• TED2014 talk by Richard Ledgett.
• Truth and Power episodes: (1) #BlackLivesMatter, (2) #Government-Sponsored Spyware, (3) The Stringray, (6) Shooting the Messenger,
• Poitras 1 (2013, 13 mins), Poitras 2 (2013, 7 mins), How we take back the internet (Edward Snowden, 2014, 80 mins)
• Haunted by Data (2015) (Maciej Ceglowski, 20 mins)

Topics for student presentations

• Website fingerprinting
• TrackMeNot, AdNauseam
• Anatomy of a NY Times webpage, as revealed by Disconnect
• Web beacons (aka web bugs, web tags)
• FBI-Apple encryption dispute of 2015/2016
• Crypto AG revelations (of 2020 and before)
• Breaking Bitcoin anonymity
• Account of 2004 hospital visit involving Gonzalez, Comey, etc. Nicely described by James Risen
• Terms and Conditions May Apply (2013)
• Civil-right/surveillance threats associated to the Graham-Blumenthal bill
• SecureDrop
• Ties between Google and US spy agencies
• Ties between Amazon and US spy agencies
• Dual_EC_DRBG
• The Juniper Networks backdoors
• President’s Surveillance Program
• Total Information Awareness
• Blechley Park / Ultra work
• Graham-Blumenthal EARN IT act
• PATRIOT Act
• CalECPA
• Debunking the “I’ve got nothing to hide” argument

Books

• The Secret Senty: The Untold History of the NSA (Matthew Aid, 2009)
• The Shadow Factory: The NSA from N/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (James Bamford, 2009)
• Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret NSA (James Bamford, 2002)
• The Puzzle Palace: Inside the NSA (James Bamford, 1983)
• Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency (Finn Brunton, 2019)
• The Psychology of Silicon Valley (Katy Cook, 2019)
• The Age of Surveillance (Frank Donner, 1981)
• Escape from Freedom (Eric Fromm, 1941)
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prision (Michel Foucault, 1975)
• State of War (James Risen, 2004)
• No Place to Hide (Glenn Greenwald, 2014)
• Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (Yasha Levine, 2018)
• Crypto: how the code rebels beat the government—saving privacy in the digital age (Steven Levy, 2001)
• Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (Gary Marx, 2016)
• 1984 (George Orwell, 1949) (James Risen, 2006)
• Pay Any Price (James Risen, 2014)
• History of the National Security State (Gore Vidal, 2014)
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff, 2020)

Websites for distributed classwork assignments

• The NSA Revelations All in One Chart (Propublica, 2014) and Snowden Surveillance Archive (CJFE)
• FBI Records: The Vault: COINTELPRO
• Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed

Additional resources

• Surveillance Studies Network
• Elections and Voting Technology (Ron Rivest, MIT)
• Security and Privacy in Computing (Matthew Green, Johns Hopkins)
• Some NGOs: ACLU, EFF, EPIC
• More people: Jennifer Granick, Ian Goldberg, Nadia Heninger, Orin Kerr, Riana Pfefferkorn, Chris Soghoian, Nick Weaver, Jonathan Zittrain