6.805/STS085 Class for April 5

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6.805/6.806/STS085 Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier
Spring Semester, 2001
April 5

Project team launch

Topic for today

In the first half of today's class, we'll try to illustrate what we mean by a "technology/policy study", by looking at two such studies in the area of encryption, the encryption controversy, and key escrow/recovery.

After that, we'll split into teams and give each team a chance to meet and get organized.

Readings to do before class

Background in the encryption controversy

Read the on-line essay The Encryption Controversy, 1994-1997 -- including the three chapter pages linked from the bottom of the introductory page -- that Hal wrote for earlier semesters of this course. This is a bit out of date, but it will give you some background. There's no need to study this or follow any of the links, except for things that particularly interest you.

Two example policy studies

We will discuss the following two pieces, as examples of technology/policy studies. Both of these deal with encryption and were motivated by the encryption controversy:

Read the Overview and summary recommenddations of the National Research Council's May 1996 Report, Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society. (The entire report is over 700 pages long -- you can find it on-line here, if you're interested.
Read The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption, by Hal Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, John Gilmore, Peter Neumann, Ronald Rivest, Jeffrey Schiller, and Bruce Schneier. This was published in May 1997 with the assistance of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Launching the project teams

Project teams were announced by email and posted to the class discussion list. Look over the resource page for your project, to get an idea of the issue and the scope of the project, and do the following reading, pertaining to your team:

Protecting Privacy Through Anonymity Tools: Skim the paper by Michael Froomkin, Flood Control on the Information Ocean
Authentication, Identification & Key Management: Look over the thesis by Marc Branchaud, A Survey of Public-Key Infrastructures
Peer-to-peer infrastructures: Read the pieces Who is spying on your downloads? and also Gnutella and the Transient Web
Deidentification and Reidentification: Read the lecture notes by Latanya Sweeney for her course at CMU (in PDF): Lecture 1, and Lecture 2, pages 91-100.
User empowerment tools built on P3P: Look over the P3P 1.0 specification, concentrating on the Introduction (section 1) and the Guiding Principles (Appendix 7).
Internet wiretapping and Carnivore: Skim the paper by Jim Dempsey Communications Privacy in the Digital Age, and also skim the Independent Review of the Carnivore System

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Last modified: March 29 2001, 11:42 PM

Hal Abelson (hal@mit.edu)
Mike Fischer (mfischer@mit.edu)
Danny Weitzner (djweitzner@w3.org)
Joe Pato (pato@hpl.hp.com)
Joanne Straggas (joanne@mit.edu)