Confidentiality and the Census (Part 2)
by Aloni Cohen Be sure to check out part 1 of this blog post here. Data Quality Confidentiality is critical for a useful, high quality Census. Perfect confidentiality is easy to achieve if we don't care about doing anything with the Census responses. Just erase them. Or don't collect them at all. But... More
Confidentiality and the Census
By Aloni Cohen A political fight is brewing around the 2020 Census. No, not about the citizenship question. This fight is about confidentiality—what's the best way to publish useful statistics without disclosing individual census responses? At the center of this fight is a lawsuit between the state of Alabama and the... More
Abuse-Resistant Government Backdoors
By Gabe Kaptchuk. It is common to use encryption hundreds of times each day: when unlocking a phone, connecting to the wifi, or loading a webpage. The rise of personal computing and the internet has transformed encryption from an esoteric military tool to critical infrastructure that gives you control over your... More
What if mail-in voting is here to stay?
By Ran Canetti and Gabe Kaptchuk. Originally featured on BUToday's What If Series. In the 2020 election, approximately 46 percent of the national population cast their ballot by mail, up from 24 percent in 2016. Do we want voting from home to stick around? Before attempting an answer, let’s recall what we... More
How a cryptographic definition of “knowledge” can help us understand the Fifth Amendment and compelled decryption
By Sarah Scheffler. The best thing about interdisciplinary work is getting to unite concepts from very different areas of study that both fields have studied extensively. As far as I know, law doesn’t have a single formal working definition of “knowledge,” but it does draw heavily from philosophy, which has a whole... More