Tackling the Hard Problem of Surveillance: Toward Privacy Protecting Protocols

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Presented at BSidesROC 2015 by

Robert Olson

The better part of the last decade has been spent with prominent media stories about tales of Internet surveillance. In most cases, this has led to calls for both better policy solutions for preventing privacy violations and better tools for protecting privacy. However, both approaches have failed to address a fundamental problem; the Internet was not designed to be private. Even the best tools for protecting user privacy rely on protocols designed to expose data that could be used for surveillance. They don’t solve the problems that permit surveillance. This talk will consider the requirements to a solution to the surveillance problem along with several methods for attacking the problem head on. While none of the techniques presented will get the Internet to a point preventing surveillance, they may help to define what a solution would look like.