Contract tracing might be the best way to tamp down a viral outbreak in its early stages — find and isolate exposed people as soon as possible — but the technique also raises plenty of privacy concerns. Perhaps inevitably, those were realized recently when the Pennslyvania Department of Health announced [Keep reading]
INTRODUCTION Four decades ago, the Soviet Union spread a horrible lie around the world. Through what’s now known as Operation Infektion, Russian agents spread a conspiracy theory that AIDS had been created in a secret U.S. military biological weapons lab in Maryland. The goal was to create strife among U.S. [Keep reading]
Get used to seeing this pop-up, and millions of others like it: Sometime soon — perhaps this week, perhaps tomorrow — Apple will turn on a simple feature that has the potential to shake up the very business model the Internet is built on: surprise surveillance. To users, it could [Keep reading]
This is the third part of the transcript from part 2 of our podcast, “What is the Original Sin of the Internet.” Tim Sparaponi is a really engaging speaker, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to him more than reading his comments. But if you’d like to skim what he [Keep reading]
This is the second transcript from part 2 of the “What is the Original Sin of the Internet” podcast launched this week. Here, Ari Schwartz — whose career has spanned the Center for Democracy and Technology and the White House and private industry — explains why it’s so hard to [Keep reading]
This is the beginning of the transcript for part two of our Debugger podcast on “The Original Sin of the Internet.” The technologists who built the Internet were naive, and their failure of imagination led us all down a path to rampant fraud, abuse, and misinformation. In part 2 of [Keep reading]
This is part 3 of the transcript for the Debugger podcast, “What is the Original Sin of the Internet.” Somehow we went from bankrupt sock puppets to a fundamental attack on free will to billions of dollars of research designed to find psychological vulnerabilities and hack people’s minds. Bill’s version [Keep reading]
This is part two of a six-part series based on my new podcast, Debugger. I am on a quest to find the Original Sin of the Internet with a series of experts who were there at the beginning of the Internet age. Next up: Bill Woodcock from the Packet [Keep reading]
First up: Richard Purcell, one of the first privacy executives. From him, you’ll learn as much about working on the railroad as you will about the abuse of power through privacy invasions. But before that, I try to explain what I mean by “original sin” in the introduction, and why [Keep reading]
Is there an Original Sin of the Internet? Join me on a journey to find out. Today I’m sharing a passion project of mine that’s been years in the making. I’m lucky. I’m getting old. Much better than the alternative! My career has spanned such a fascinating time in the [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan