Defcon 2010 - Your ISP and the Government Best Friends Forever - Christopher Soghoian

[Mirrorshades]

Defcon 2010 - Your ISP and the Government Best Friends Forever - Christopher Soghoian

Christopher Soghoian should be a national treasure -- I wish there were 100 more like him.

Mr. Soghoian is a Doctoral (Ph.D.) candidate at the University of Indiana, School of Informatics. He is perhaps best known for his boarding pass hack back in 2007, where he published an app that would allow anyone to generate a fake boarding pass (complete with barcode) that could be scanned, and accepted as authentic by the airlines' computer systems.

He did this to demonstrate that the airline boarding pass system was thoroughly broken. Needless to say, this caused considerable outrage on the part of the authorities, and as a result, his home was raided by the FBI one morning at 2am. In the end, no charges were brought, but it did force the airlines to change their software to something rather more secure.

For about a year, Mr. Soghoian worked half-time for the Federal Trade Commission, as their first technologist in residence, advising FTC lawyers on technical issues related to breaches of privacy involving computers.

As part of his research towards his doctoral degree, he has filed numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for data that the government would really rather you not be aware of. Some of these documents are used for the basis of his slides used in this talk, which was given at Defcon 2010.

The entire presentation is about 45 minutes long -- I cannot recommend that people watch this highly enough.

Here is the YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJDCxzKmROY

Mirrorshades

[doozied]

wow!! that was realy interesting.... its hard to know who to trust with your data... i have only seen about 15 minutes so far and am blown away

[Drizzile]

its crazy how easy they just give over our info to the law really makes you think