The topics and readings listed here are subject to change, including in response to current events
Jan 18
Introduction
Jan 25
Legal Foundations of Privacy
  • Katz v U.S. 389 US 347 (1967)
    Smith v Maryland 442 US 735 (1979)
    18 USC 2510-2522, 2701-2712: wiretap law; Stored Communications Act (recommended)
    18 USC 3121-3127: pen registers and trap-and-trace devices (recommended)
    50 USC 1801-1811: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (recommended)
  • Chapter II of the EU Privacy Directive (Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data) (You may find this page helpful, but it's not required reading.)
  • Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, Chapter 7. Whit Diffie and Susan Landau, MIT Press, 1998, first edition. Click on "Table of Contents" and then on Chapter 7.
Feb 01
Wiretapping
Feb 08
The Web: Cookies
Feb 15
The Web: Protecting Privacy
Midterm paper topic approval deadline
Feb 22
Database Nation; Link Analysis
  • Read chapter 4 of Database Nation, by Simson Garfinkel, O'Reilly and Associates, 2000. The link to the book is via the Columbia library network; full text is available. However... they seem to limit the number of simultanous readers; do not wait until the night before. (In fact, you may wish to read more; it's a fast read. Chapter 9 is prescient and scary --- and it was written before the terrorist attacks of 9/11.)
  • Communities of Interest, C.Cortes, D. Pregibon, and C. Volinsky, Proceedings of IDA 2001 - Intelligent Data Analysis, 2001.
  • Mining Social Network from Spatio-Temporal Events, Hady W. Lauw, Ee-Peng Lim, Teck-Tim Tan, and Hwee-Hwa Pang. Workshop on Link Analysis, Counterterrorism and Security, 2005.
Mar 01
Social Networks
Mar 08
Privacy and Data Mining
Mar 22
Anonymous Connectivity

Midterm papers due

Mar 29
Traffic Analysis
Final paper topic approval deadline
Apr 05
Side Channels
Apr 12
Digital Cash
Apr 19
Traceability
Apr 26
Location Privacy
May 10

Final papers due