Meetings and Events

In an uncensored and unleashed version of an ISSA Privacy SIG presentation from June, George will be making a strong declaration relevant to the times: why privacy and security (usually) need anonymity.

As privacy finally becomes an acceptable and even popular service and product feature, its sibling anonymity is still carries nefarious connotations. Privacy advocates onced faced questions like "do you have something to hide?" Similar retorts are now posed to anonymity advocates.

But creating privacy solutions without anonymity means ignoring a core aspect of (corporate,nation-state) surveillance: metadata. Knowing who talked to whom, when did they talk and for how long, makes the actual content of the communications less relevant in an era of mass surveillance.

Cut down to the basics and unfettered, we'll look at the changing environment of privacy, relating it to anonymity then approach some of the basic ingredients necessary for adapting anonymity to technical solutions today.

And yes, the relevance of BSD Unix will be woven throughout, somehow, someway.

We encourage questions and even wildly incorrect opinions before the meeting on the talk@ mailing list and on IRC at libera.net #nycbug.

George Rosamond is a founder and long-time admin@ member of NYC*BUG. He's the co-founder and CTO of ClearOPS, a privacy and security technology startup.

A sysadmin by trade with citizenship in BSD Unix land, his area of interest and expertise lies with privacy enhancing technologies, most importantly with the Tor Project. He thrives on creating and designing unorthodox solutions to ordinary problems, but so do most other people in the *BSD community.

Q&A will be via IRC on libera.chat, channel #nycbug