Révélations d'Edward Snowden

vignette|droite|upright=1|Edward Snowden en 2013. Les révélations d'Edward Snowden commencent avec un important volume de documents () transmis par l'ancien agent de la CIA et consultant de la NSA Edward Snowden à deux journalistes, Glenn Greenwald et Laura Poitras, et progressivement rendus publics à partir du à travers plusieurs titres de presse. Elles concernent la surveillance d'internet, des téléphones portables et de tous les moyens de télécommunication mondiaux par la NSA. Le , le journal britannique The Guardian commence à publier et analyser une partie des révélations. Devant le nombre colossal de données, plus de de la rédaction du Guardian travaillent à plein temps sur ce dossier. Depuis cette date, de nombreux autres médias et en particulier, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Intercept, Der Spiegel, El País, Le Monde, L'espresso, O Globo, South China Morning Post, ProPublica, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, NRC Handelsb

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

MediaEval 2012 Visual Privacy Task: Applying Transform-domain Scrambling to Automatically Detected Faces

Touradj Ebrahimi, Aleksei Triastcyn

In this paper, we describe our approach and discuss evaluation results for the MediaEval 2012 Visual Privacy task. The goal of the task is to obscure faces of people visible in provided surveillance clips to preserve their personal privacy. We also additionally assume, although it is not explicitly stated in the task description, that the privacy protection should be done in an automated way and the applied privacy tool should be reversible and prone to attacks. We use a combination of a face detection algorithm and transform-domain scrambling technique, which pseudo-randomly scrambles bits during encoding, that was applied to the detected face regions. The evaluations of the resulted automated privacy protection tool showed that inaccuracies of the face detection algorithm affected both objective and subjective results. An interesting finding is how- ever that scrambling, while being non-distractive to the evaluating subjects, appeared significantly irritating with score of 0.8, but only for ’evening’ subset of the dataset.

2012

Field-effect transistor device or sensor for sensing ions, molecules or biomarkers in a fluid

Francesco Bellando, Mihai Adrian Ionescu, Junrui Zhang

The present disclosure concerns a Field-Effect Transistor device or sensor comprising at least one drain region, at least one source region, at least a channel region, at least a first gate connected to the channel region, at least one stack comprising at least one metal layer or metal extension and at least one via layer or via extension; or a plurality of alternating (i) metal layers or metal extensions and (ii) via layers or via extensions, at least one second gate or second layer connected to the at least one first gate by the at least one stack, the at least one second gate or second layer permitting sensing of ions, and/or molecules and/or biomarkers, and at least one microfluidic channel or structure connected to or provided on the at least one second gate or second layer.

2019

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

Félicien Michel Marie Goguey

EPFL2022