How Can We Protect the Internet Against Surveillance
How Can We Protect the Internet Against Surveillance? Seven To-Do Items for Users, Internet Engineers and Policymakers. Hosted by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society cyberlaw.stanford.edu/events/cis-tech-workshop-how-can-we-protect-internet-against-surveillance In this talk, EFF's Technology Projects Director Peter Eckersley surveyed the state of Internet security and surveillance in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations. It is unlikely that we can protect most Internet users against sophisticated, targeted attacks by their own and other governments, but there is more reason to be optimistic that we might shield the bulk of users' data against the type of dragnet surveillance that the US and other governments are conducting. Peter discussed the things that individual users can currently do to achieve stronger communications security; the (often very subtle) technical aspects to deploying HTTPS/TLS/SSL securely on the server side; some of the important places where our existing protocols are letting us down from a security and privacy perspective; the terrible dynamics of cross border-surveillance; and what we could do to change all of this. Peter Eckersley is Technology Projects Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He keeps his eyes peeled for technologies that, by accident or design, pose a risk to computer users' freedoms—and then looks for ways to fix them. He explains gadgets to lawyers, and lawyers to gadgets. Peter's work at EFF has included privacy and security projects such as Panopticlick, HTTPS Everywhere, SSDI, and the SSL Observatory; helping to launch a movement for open wireless networks; fighting to keep modern computing platforms open; and running the first controlled tests to confirm that Comcast was using forged reset packets to interfere with P2P protocols. Peter holds a PhD in computer science and law from the University of Melbourne; his research focused on the practicality and desirability of using alternative compensation systems to legalize P2P file sharing and similar distribution tools while still paying authors and artists for their work. He is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
