Lawful Illegality: Authorizing Extraterritorial Police Surveillance

Multiple Objectives of Lawful-Surveillance Protocols

In recent work on open, privacy-preserving, accountable surveillance, we have proposed the use of cryptographic protocols that enable law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to obtain actionable information about targeted users of mass-communication systems without intruding on the privacy of untargeted users. Our suggestion that appropriate technology, combined with sound policy and the rule...

Open, privacy-preserving protocols for lawful surveillance

The question of how government agencies can acquire actionable, useful information about legitimate but unknown targets without intruding upon the electronic activity of innocent parties is extremely important. We address this question by providing experimental evidence that actionable, useful information can indeed be obtained in a manner that preserves the privacy of innocent parties and that...

‘On the Perimeter of the Lawful’: Enduring Illegality in the Irish Family Planning Movement, 1972-1985

Between 1935 and 1985, Irish law criminalized the sale and importation of condoms. Activists established illegal markets to challenge the law and alleviate its social consequences. They distributed condoms through postal services, shops, stalls, clinics, and machines. Though they largely operated in the open, their activities attracted little direct punishment from the state, and they were able...

Against the Law: Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance

Front-line journalists are high-value targets, and their enemies will spare no expense to silence them. Unfortunately, journalists can be betrayed by their own tools. Their smartphones are also the perfect tracking device. Because of the precedent set by the US’s “third-party doctrine,” which holds that metadata on such signals enjoys no meaningful legal protection, governments and powerful pol...

Balancing Privacy with Legitimate Surveillance and Lawful Data Access