Citizen Lab Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire gave a talk at the MIT Center for Civic Media in Cambridge, MA on Thursday, November 7, 2013.

The presentation was live blogged by J. Nathan Mathias and Willow Brugh. The talk was titled, “This Mess We’re In: The Changing Landscape of Digital Surveillance”.

Marquis-Boire spoke about targeted surveillance versus mass surveillance as well as the recent commercialization of targeted surveillance. He also discussed BlueCoat Systems, a Silicon Valley company that makes devices for network monitoring, real time network surveillance and content filtering and whose technologies have been found in countries with questionable human rights records, as Citizen Lab research has found.

Marquis-Boire also spoke about “coercion resistant design”, and suggested that “as your web service increases in popularity, the likelihood that you will eventually be forced to coerce your security model approaches 1.” If we’re engineering honesty and properly, we need to think about this issue from day one. Marquis-Boire then presented five ideas for coercion resistant design.

Follow the presentation and read the live blog here.