CS Colloquium
Speaker: Bruce Schneier
Title: NSA Surveillance and What To Do About It
Host: Joan Feigenbaum
Abstract: Edward Snowden has given us an unprecedented window into the NSA’s surveillance activities. Drawing from both the Snowden documents and revelations from previous whistleblowers, this talk describes the sorts of surveillance the NSA conducts and how it conducts it. The emphasis will be on the technical capabilities of the NSA, and not the politics or legality of their actions. I will then discuss what sorts of countermeasures are likely to frustrate any nation-state adversary with these sorts of capabilities. These will be techniques to raise the cost of wholesale surveillance in favor of targeted surveillance: ubiquitous encryption, target dispersal, anonymity tools, and so on.