In his recent post on sextortion as cybersecurity, Benjamin Wittes rightly points out that every webcam should have a physical cover or off-switch. I want to add an additional technical point: Even barri...

In the week since the release of our sextortion reports, there have been a number of encouraging signs of legislative interest in the problem. The day Brookings released the reports, Rep.

Like many of us on the internet, sextortionists rely on pseudonyms to carry out their work, whether in order to hide their identity online or to affirmatively present a false one.

China Targets US Tech Companies in Security Reviews. "Chinese authorities are quietly scrutinizing technology products sold in China by Apple and other big foreign companies, focusing on whether they pos...

The Court’s opinion in Spokeo v. Robins is here. I wrote about Spokeo when it was argued last November. My concern was that a ruling in Spokeo’s favor might limit Congress’s ability to provide private re...

Susan Landau’s post suggesting agreement rather than disagreement between the Don’t Panic report and the ODNI response to it brings to mind the dialog in the 1977 Woody Allen film Annie Hall.

One interesting feature of the sextortion research we released this week—a feature we did not discuss in the papers themselves—is the interaction between this issue and the “going dark” debate. We left t...

When we think of cybersecurity, we don't think of sexual violence. Sexual assault, rape, and child molestation are problems of intimate contact between individuals in close proximity to one another. By c...

Author’s note: Despite appearing under my byline, this post actually represents the work of a larger group. The Keys Under Doormats group includes Harold Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, Josh ...

Prosecutors colloquially call it “sextortion.” Legally speaking, there’s no such thing. The word is a kind a prosecutorial slang for a class of cases that do not correspond neatly with any known crimina...