Surveillance, big data and democracy: lessons for Australia from the US and UK

This article argues that current laws are ill-equipped to deal with the multifaceted threats to individual privacy by governments, corporations and our own need to participate in the information society. Introduction In the era of big data, where people find themselves surveilled in ever more finely granulated aspects of their lives, and where the data profiles built from an accumulation of data gathered about themselves and others are used to predict as well as shape their behaviours, the question of privacy protection arises constantly. In this article we interrogate whether the discourse of privacy is sufficient to address this new paradigm of information flow and control. What we confront in this area is a set of practices concerning the collection, aggregation, sharing, interrogation and uses of data on a scale that crosses private and public boundaries, jurisdictional boundaries, and importantly, the boundaries between reality and simulation. The consequences of these practices are emerging as sometimes useful and sometimes damaging to governments, citizens and commercial organisations. Understanding how to regulate this sphere of activity to address the harms, to create an infrastructure of accountability, and to bring more transparency to the practices mentioned, is a challenge of some complexity. Using privacy frameworks may not provide the solutions or protections that ultimately are being sought. This article is concerned with data gathering and surveillance practices, by business and government, and the implications for individual privacy in the face of widespread collection and use of big data. We will firstly outline the practices around data and the issues that arise from such practices. We then consider how courts in the United Kingdom (‘UK’) and the United States (‘US’) are attempting to frame these issues using current legal frameworks, and finish by considering the Australian context. Notably the discourse around privacy protection differs significantly across these jurisdictions, encompassing elements of constitutional rights and freedoms, specific legislative schemes, data protection, anti-terrorist and criminal laws, tort and equity. This lack of a common understanding of what is or what should be encompassed within privacy makes it a very fragile creature indeed. On the basis of the exploration of these issues, we conclude that current laws are ill-equipped to deal with the multifaceted threats to individual privacy by governments, corporations and our own need to participate in the information society

Addra: Metadata-private voice communication over fully untrusted infrastructure

Metadata from voice calls, such as the knowledge of who is communicating with whom, contains rich information about people’s lives. Indeed, it is a prime target for powerful adversaries such as nation states. Existing systems that hide voice call metadata either require trusted intermediaries in the network or scale to only tens of users. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of Addra, the first system for voice communication that hides metadata over fully untrusted infrastructure and scales to tens of thousands of users. At a high level, Addra follows a template in which callers and callees deposit and retrieve messages from private mailboxes hosted at an untrusted server. However, Addra improves message latency in this architecture, which is a key performance metric for voice calls. First, it enables a caller to push a message to a callee in two hops, using a new way of assigning mailboxes to users that resembles how a post office assigns PO boxes to its customers. Second, it innovates on the underlying cryptographic machinery and constructs a new private information retrieval scheme, FastPIR, that reduces the time to process oblivious access requests for mailboxes. An evaluation of Addra on a cluster of 80 machines on AWS demonstrates that it can serve 32K users with a 99-th percentile message latency of 726 ms—a 7× improvement over a prior system for text messaging in the same threat model

Smart PIN: utility-based replication and delivery of multimedia content to mobile users in wireless networks

Next generation wireless networks rely on heterogeneous connectivity technologies to support various rich media services such as personal information storage, file sharing and multimedia streaming. Due to users’ mobility and dynamic characteristics of wireless networks, data availability in collaborating devices is a critical issue. In this context Smart PIN was proposed as a personal information network which focuses on performance of delivery and cost efficiency. Smart PIN uses a novel data replication scheme based on individual and overall system utility to best balance the requirements for static data and multimedia content delivery with variable device availability due to user mobility. Simulations show improved results in comparison with other general purpose data replication schemes in terms of data availability

A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways."--P. [4] of cove

Institutional Repositories in India: A Case Study of National Aerospace Laboratories

This paper traces the history and developments in Open Archives Initiatives including open access journals, e-print archives and Institutional repositories. The setting up of NAL’s Institutional Repository using OSS GNU Eprints, document types with statistical analysis, country wise statistics of full text download, levels of accessibility and technologies used in building the Institutional Repository have been discussed at lengt

OpenMinTeD: A Platform Facilitating Text Mining of Scholarly Content

The OpenMinTeD platform aims to bring full text Open Access scholarly content from a wide range of providers together with Text and Data Mining (TDM) tools from various Natural Language Processing frameworks and TDM developers in an integrated environment. In this way, it supports users who want to mine scientific literature with easy access to relevant content and allows running scalable TDM workflows in the cloud