AUDIT: Practical Accountability of Secret Processes

The US federal court system is exploring ways to improve the accountability of electronic surveillance, an opaque process often involving cases sealed from public view and tech companies subject to gag orders against informing surveilled users. One judge has proposed publicly releasing some metadata about each case on a paper cover sheet as a way to balance the competing goals of (1) secrecy, so the target of an investigation does not discover and sabotage it, and (2) accountability, to assure the public that surveillance powers are not misused or abused. Inspired by the courts\u27 accountability challenge, we illustrate how accountability and secrecy are simultaneously achievable when modern cryptography is brought to bear. Our system improves configurability while preserving secrecy, offering new tradeoffs potentially more palatable to the risk-averse court system. Judges, law enforcement, and companies publish commitments to surveillance actions, argue in zero-knowledge that their behavior is consistent, and compute aggregate surveillance statistics by multi-party computation (MPC). We demonstrate that these primitives perform efficiently at the scale of the federal judiciary. To do so, we implement a hierarchical form of MPC that mirrors the hierarchy of the court system. We also develop statements in succinct zero-knowledge (SNARKs) whose specificity can be tuned to calibrate the amount of information released. All told, our proposal not only offers the court system a flexible range of options for enhancing accountability in the face of necessary secrecy, but also yields a general framework for accountability in a broader class of secret information processes

Barriers to Coordination? Examining the Impact of Culture on International Mediation Occurrence and Effectiveness

‘Culture’ features prominently in the literature on international mediation: if belligerents share cultural characteristics, they are likely to have a common understanding and norms. This creates a common identity and makes coordination less costly, which ultimately facilitates mediation occurrence and effectiveness. Surprisingly, existing quantitative research largely neglects any cultural ties the antagonists might share with the mediator. This article addresses this gap by offering one of the first joint analyses of fighting parties’ and mediators’ culture – and the interaction thereof. Based on existing work, a theoretical framework for mediation occurrence and effectiveness is developed and innovative measures for belligerents’ cultural ties and the links to the mediator are used. Contrary to expectations the results suggest that larger cultural distances between antagonists make mediation more likely, while cultural dissimilarities between them and the mediator have the opposite effect. Evidence is also found for a conditional effect between the two culture variables on mediation occurrence