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Invading Privacy for School Credit

Posted by timothy on from the and-for-a-good-cause dept.

veryloco writes "Students in Prof. Avi Rubin's Security and Privacy course at the Johns Hopkins University completed a project where they gathered as much public data on residents of Baltimore City as possible. One interesting fact was that 50 deceased persons voted in the last election. Read on to find out what other interesting tidbits were discovered."

4 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OT: Article formatting by Cecil · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Absolutely! Also, I love how you can click on the right half of the article to move to the next page, or left side to move back... it's completely contrary to web standards but it's so useful that I just love it anyway. The whole website's entirely Firefox compatable, has no shitty floating javascript toolbars or other garbage

    I regularly point to it as an example of excellent corporate webdesign, but I don't think it gets NEARLY enough credit. It's a fantastic website.

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    Random and weird software I've written.
  2. Necromancy by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Rubin has been one of the people screaming the past few years about how easy the elections would be to hack. Now it seems that he's widened his scope, showing how much of a joke is any attempt at precise counting of so many people.

    We need election laws that guarantee the margin of victory is larger than the sampling error. In fact, we need a law that requires the office get at least a simple majority (50%) of the eligible voters, or it goes unfilled. With so few eligible voters actually voting, that would force districts to hold runoffs, and parties to get out the vote. Or just get outnumbered by the representatives from districts which do turn out. Put a little competition into our rotten voting system, and cut out the deadwood.

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    make install -not war

  3. Infrastructure Mapping by bubba_ry · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This reminds me a news item I saw/read about 1-2 years ago where a student wanted to see if he could map out the U.S.'s infratructure given public records/information. He was extremely successful in that he mapped out whole power grids, telecom lines, subways, etc and overlayed them all. Much to his dismay, he was held from presenting this (his doctorate thesis, I believe) by the Feds who worried that terrorists would want to get their hands on the info.

    And if you're a terrorist, that makes sense; someone else has already done the work for you and provided additional instructions on how to do so. On the other hand, this poor guy can't complete his work. And all he did was what any Tom, Dick, or Harry could've done.

  4. Personal addresses by Husgaard · · Score: 3, Interesting
    In the country where I live it is extremely hard to get the address of somebody from any government (or other public) office. The only place where you can get an address is from our public cencus office. They will give you the address for a small fee unless they have been asked to keep the address secret (in which case you cannot get the address at all).

    You may ask why. This came about after a few cases of abused women trying to flee husbands and starting a new life in another part of the country, but being found and battered by their former husbands. When the media found out that the former husbands had gotten the new address of their former wifes from public offices, we had a sensible political reaction.

    But then, I live in a european country. In Europe we have a very different attitude to, and better laws on the treatment of personal information compared to the US.