Science on Tap
Season 2 • The Fun Continues
Thursday, August 1, 2013
5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Cosmo Tapas Restaurant
4200 Central Ave SE
Watching the watchmen: Can you "see" Internet
surveillance?
This talk will explore a question in the science of
information and computation, which is: can you see when somebody is performing
surveillance on you online? I'll start with some background about the
global scene of Internet censorship and surveillance, explaining some of the
techniques that we've used to document these two distinct, but related,
phenomena. Censorship is relatively easy to detect. For example, if
you try to post something sensitive on a social media site and your friends
can't see the post, then it has probably been censored. Surveillance is
much harder to detect, however, and in most cases detection is virtually
impossible. I'll describe some on-going research at UNM about how to
infer through scans what's going on deep in the bowels of the Internet, which
may provide clues about different kinds of Internet surveillance
infrastructures around the world.
Jed Crandall is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. With the goal of
protecting free and open communications online, Crandall's research group
develops cutting-edge techniques for inferring what's really going on the
Internet and in software that connects to the Internet. This entails
things like network scanning techniques, reverse-engineering of machine code,
and automated Asian-language natural language processing.
