[Air-L] NSA and privacy?

Seda Guerses sguerses at esat.kuleuven.be
Mon Jun 17 14:43:28 PDT 2013


dear robert, 

i am responding to this note with a bit of delay, mostly because of the unfolding of events in turkey, and, yet, i think this is all related. in other words, i believe that the nsa leaks could and probably should make us look at assumptions about social media, web services, surveillance etc. in our research. 

on a related note, my colleague claudia diaz and i authored a paper [1] on a divide in privacy research on online social networks based in computer science. one approach takes as its basis government surveillance and threat models for studying privacy problems in online social networks and proposing solutions. the other approach concentrates on online social networks as mainly consumer services and privacy as the problem of negotiating personal boundaries between users or making informed decisions with respect to it. we found that a similar analysis of a division in research was given by kate raynes goldie in her thesis [1]. we argued that the two approaches abstract each other away and research in computer science could benefit if we could better integrate the diversity of concerns (surveillance, social privacy, institutional privacy but also other matters). surely internet researchers have been more differentiated about the relationship between government surveillance and online web services, but it would be lovely to hear, if anybody has put any of this and its effects on internet research on paper? or, if any of you had ideas on how to bring these issues together in internet research?

i also say these things are related as the turkish government has announced today that it will make new laws to go after social media users that distribute "provocative and false" news, and another turkish company announced that it has suspended its services in turkey since they do not want to comply with the government's requirement to give the authorities physical access to their network data (an foia request has already been submitted) [3]. while the former may be specific to turkey, the latter is a re-instantiation of prism in other countries. given these announcements, protesters using social media have turned to various tactical communication methods some of which were discussed by alternetif bilisim [4]. it would be great to get references to recent studies on tactical media use of social media or to meet with others who are thinking about these questions. so, if you are interested, please do let me know.
best,
s.



[1] http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/publications/article-2270.pdf
[2] http://www.k4t3.org/2012/09/13/privacy-in-the-age-of-facebook-discourse-architecture-consequences/
[3] http://www.tulumba.com/newsletter/newsletter_e.html
[4] http://www.alternatifbilisim.org/wiki/An_analysis_of_Gezi_Parki

Message: 4
Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2013 16:04:49 -0400
From: nativebuddha <nativebuddha at gmail.com>
To: "air-l at listserv.aoir.org" <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Subject: [Air-L] NSA and privacy?
Message-ID: <CFB2A49A-0D1D-4C82-A4CE-9C9A861B137D at gmail.com>
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Surprised that there's no discussion here on NSA and metadata collection. Seems like prime aoir material. Maybe some privacy scholars and cryptography experts can give some expert comments?

-Robert



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