Mass surveillance | EPFL Graph Search

Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizations, such as organizations like the NSA, but it may also be carried out by corporations (either on behalf of governments or at their own initiative). Depending on each nation's laws and judicial systems, the legality of and the permission required to engage in mass surveillance varies. It is the single most indicative distinguishing trait of totalitarian regimes. It is also often distinguished from targeted surveillance. Mass surveillance has often been cited as necessary to fight terrorism, prevent crime and social unrest, protect national security, and control the population. At the same time, mass surveillance has equally often been criticized for violating privacy rights, limiting civil and political rights and freedoms, and being illegal un

Opacité et transparence dans le design d'un dispositif de surveillance urbain : le cas de l'IMSI catcher

Félicien Michel Marie Goguey

This thesis assesses the surveillance operated on the mobile phone network by governmental actors (intelligence agencies, police, army) and the relationship between monitored spaces and their users. Indeed, some new surveillance devices used by intelligence services redefine surveillance spatiality raising new questions in this field of research. More specifically this research focuses on one specific object: the IMSI catcher, a monitoring apparatus of the cellular network that intercepts cellphones' identity and some communications in a given area by mimicking the activity of a cell tower. While this kind of device seems to offer a tactical and a security interest in the fight against terrorism and against crime, many civil liberties organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy International and _La Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertÃ©s are concerned about the potential of an uncontrolled surveillance ; indeed, the controversial nature of the device could endanger certain individual and public rights. What is this technical object and which new issues comes with its use in surveillance? How and from which perspective is it problematic What does the IMSI catcher teaches us on the potential future of surveillance regimes? I look into this specific device case in a research framework at the intersection of design research practices, science and technology studies (STS) and surveillance studies. First, I deal with this surveillance apparatus as a technical object, from a perspective fed by the theoretical framework of concretization and technical lines proposed by Gilbert Simondon and Yves Deforge, through the analysis of a visual and technical documentation. Second, I use a research by design approach to explore certain assumptions regarding the nature of the object itself, its functioning and its "concrete" aspect â or rather "non-concrete" in the present case â with the help of approaches borrowed to reverse engineering and reconstitution, close to media archeology. Then, I explore possible opposition and protest trajectories with the help of prototypes designed with critical design and speculative design methods. Finally, through the writing of prospective scenarios, I build a design fiction that offers a synthesis, potentially subject to debate, around the IMSI catcher's uses, present and to come, and more broadly on the potential future of surveillance regimes.

EPFL2022

Catch Me If You Can Designing a Disobedient Object to Protest Against GSM Surveillance

Félicien Michel Marie Goguey

In this article, I discuss the process of designing an object to protest against a specific surveillance device: the IMSI catcher, a controversial object used to monitor GSM networks. Being widely used in protests, I develop a tactical approach based on obfuscation to be adopted collectively to counteract IMSI catchers. In this case study, (1) I present how can remaking an IMSI catcher allow to re-appropriate the technology and create a basis for designing a disobedient object; (2) I introduce some examples of tactics to defeat surveillance based on obfuscation and the potential of inflatables; (3) I conceptualize a possible design of an object to defeat IMSI catchers and show the types of interactions it might generate in protests.

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Symmetric Asynchronous Ratcheted Communication with Associated Data

Serge Vaudenay, Hailun Yan

Following up mass surveillance and privacy issues, modern secure communication protocols now seek strong security, such as forward secrecy and post-compromise security, in the face of state exposures. To address this problem, ratcheting was thereby introduced, widely used in real-world messaging protocols like Signal. However, ratcheting comes with a high cost. Recently, Caforio et al. proposed pragmatic constructions which compose a weakly secure “light” protocol and a strongly secure “heavy” protocol, in order to achieve the so-called ratcheting on demand. The light protocol they proposed has still a high complexity. In this paper, we prove the security of the lightest possible protocol we could imagine, which essentially encrypts then hashes the secret key. We prove it without any random oracle by introducing a new security notion in the standard model. Our protocol composes well with the generic transformation techniques by Caforio et al. to offer high security and performance at the same time.

Springer, Cham2020

Opacité et transparence dans le design d'un dispositif de surveillance urbain : le cas de l'IMSI catcher

Félicien Michel Marie Goguey

EPFL2022