Internet censorship has long been a controversial issue which involves the selective restriction of information. This could simply be as mundane as upholding copyright laws, but censorship also extends into political repression and human rights violations. Restrictive and authoritarian regimes have been shown to be far more likely to suppress political content to subdue criticism. Russia has a particularly egregious reputation for censorship and restriction of speech online. Since 2012, the Kremlin has consistently acted to create legislation aimed at regulating online content and attempting to garner the support of the Russian people in doing so. This is significant especially because it has been found that Internet Literacy is negatively correlated with the perception of a necessity of government surveillance (people who are less familiar with the Internet tend to perceive a higher necessity of surveillance). The Russian government, then, draws attention to the dangers of the Internet and social media, including risks of hate speech, crime, violent protests and fake news. The government frames laws as protecting citizens and their rights from these threats. Furthermore, these threats are proclaimed to be both internal and external and are subsequently used to justify political repression through online censorship and strict controls that are characteristic of authoritarianism.

For as long as the TOR network has existed one of its primary uses has been the circumvention of Internet firewalls run by oppressive regimes. Iran is no exception to this trend, and in as early as 2011 Iran was the 2nd highest country by TOR users.1 There was even a point where TOR developers and the Iranian government ended up in a technological arms race as the government aimed to block the network while Tor developers simultaneously created new ways to circumvent said blocks, with developers even releasing same-day updates to counteract new restrictions.9 Iran has repeatedly been ranked among the worst countries in the world for press freedom, and it continues to offer little to no opportunity for Iranian citizens to access uncensored media on the Bright Web.11 In recent years, Iran has vastly improved its censorship technology, and Tor developers have been forced to react quickly to continue to provide access to Tor in Iran.

The Tor network provides unparalleled anonymity to its users. Using anonymity features on top of TCP, The Onion Router has proved useful for moderately low-latency tasks such as web browsing (Borinsov and Goldberg 2008). Tor networks operate through a network of thousands of decentralized, independently run nodes across the world. To connect to the network, a computer needs to be running the Tor browser. This browser will randomly connect to its first node, or relay. Each relay in the network only knows the location of the relay or computer immediately preceding and succeeding it. This process completely obfuscates the original computer’s location and makes it appear as if the computer’s IP address is the same as the Tor exit nodes. The connection will travel through three nodes before connecting to a web server- either outside the Tor network, such as a .com or .org top-level domain (TLD), or inside the Tor network- the .onion TLD. These .onion TLDs are known as Onion or hidden services and provide advanced anonymity features like hidden location and IP addresses, end-to-end encryption, automatically generated domain names, and website authentication between the user and the onion service. It can enable sites to be built that publish work without being worried about censorship (Jardine 2018).

Last week I arrived in Kyiv after 48 hours to planes and trains to a rain and snow mix falling on the Kyiv central train station. Men eagerly ran up to the arriving train carriages with flowers in hand to greet wives and girlfriends who had made the journey back to Ukraine. The train was entirely populated by women, children, and older men. The joy of reunion was conditioned by the reality of war. I have been coming to Kyiv for 20 years, first as a Peace Corps Volunteer, then as a research scientist for the United States Army Cyber Institute, and now as an academic from Virginia Tech invited to speak on the laws of war in cyberspace at the Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum at the request of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council (NSDC). The change in the city is palpable. It is a city both serving as the hub of the national idea of Ukraine, but also one that is clearly in and acutely impacted by the ongoing war.

In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare, the significance of cybersecurity cannot be overstated, as it plays a pivotal role in both preserving the integrity of services and safeguarding sensitive patient data. With the continuous digitization of healthcare, including the widespread adoption of electronic health records and the integration of new medical devices, the need for robust protection against emerging cyber threats becomes increasingly urgent. This urgency is further emphasized by the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) as a crucial tool in healthcare diagnostics, clinical practice, clinical data management, and further automation and enhanced need for cybersecurity. This blog post aims to explore the multifaceted application of AI in healthcare. The overarching objective is to explore how AI technologies contribute to the enhancement of contemporary healthcare practices, how they impact cybersecurity, and how they provide insights into the promising and concerning future of AI in healthcare.

It was a privilege to have been asked to represent Virginia Tech at the 74th Annual Class of 1971 Student Conference on U.S. Affairs - SCUSA 74. This conference has been occurring since 1949 and this year, the class of 1971 graciously donated funds for this event. Since 1949, delegates both nationally and internationally have been invited to this conference to strengthen civilian-military relationships, develop leadership skills, and engage in meaningful discussions. Conference themes have ranged from Confronting Inequality: Wealth, Rights, and Power to The National Security Policy of the United States: The Sputnik Decade. This year's theme was “Innovation and the Future of American Foreign Policy.”

Microsoft Windows is a powerful and long-standing operating system with deep-rooted features that work throughout the system. Windows’ .NET, PowerShell, and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) frameworks provide cohesiveness and control, enabling the creation of new features and integration across the system. However, as these systems advance in capabilities and features, malicious actors have more opportunities to break into them. Fileless malware is an increasingly common attack method that cyber groups use to break into and persist in systems without a trace. In contrast to traditional malware, which installs itself on the hard drive as a file, fileless malware abuses the .NET and WMI frameworks to inject code and scripts directly into a system's memory without creating any files or interacting with the hard drive. This offers attackers several advantages: evading detection from signature-based antimalware programs, persistence within the system, and increased difficulty to remove the malicious code.[

AI sentiment analysis offers a potential solution to the problem of determining the attitudes of the Russian public towards the war in Ukraine. Traditional polling conducted within an authoritarian state suffers from the limitation of its inability to accurately assess public opinion in the context of being unable to honestly report public opinion which may be hostile to the state. Polls conducted in Russia are no exception to state censorship and respondents are reluctant to state their genuine opinions under questioning, potentially resulting in an inflated image of widespread public support for the war. AI sentiment analysis can provide more accurate insights on the state of public opinion through direct analysis of social media posts but suffers from its own biases dependent on sample size, program accuracy, and translation flaws. This post examines the potentials and drawbacks of AI sentiment analysis compared to traditional polling methods in determining Russian public opinion on the war in Ukraine.

The Indian government's use of Pegasus spyware demonstrates the need for stronger regulations to protect citizens' constitutional right to privacy from unlawful government surveillance. The distribution of spyware technology to governments and subsequent infiltration of personal data in the name of national security has resulted in mass human rights abuse. As the right to privacy is a fundamental right expressed in the Indian constitution, recent revelations on the unlawful use of Pegasus spyware by the Indian government procured by the Pegasus Project initiative question the regulations in place to protect human rights against spyware technology. Enactment of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill serves as the initial step towards protecting the constitutional rights of Indian citizens; however, further regulation is needed to ensure government accountability of surveillance use. As such, implications of the recently enacted legislation on surveillance and the consideration of additional regulations needed to prevent future human rights violations will be explored. To prevent such egregious rights violations in the future, India needs stricter laws limiting government surveillance powers and closing loopholes that enable spyware abuse.

The proliferation of spyware has led to revelations of human rights abuses by democratic governments and authoritarian states alike. The latest reporting on the global surveillance-for-hire industry details the utilization of military-equivalent cyber weapons, the likes of NSO Group’s Pegasus and Cytrox’s Predator, in international conflict, specifically the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in Armenia and Azerbaijan. The deployment of powerful spyware that is maintained and sold by a third-party company calls into question the rules of cross-border surveillance. What does the presence of Predator and Pegasus spyware in the Nagorno-Karabakh region indicate about the forthcoming uses of cyber espionage in times of war? Finally, a description of the current legal system and human rights safeguards in place and its shortcomings in the global spyware industry will be examined.

Can technology cure disease? Frequently the capabilities of innovative technologies are placed on a pedestal for their potential to revolutionize disease treatment and cure. This post poses questions on the future of disease and technology to ChatGPT.

Just as in the post last week comparing the answers of Bard to ChatGPT on the War in Ukraine this post picks up on the previous post examining ChatGPT’s answers on AI Common Sense, Rationality and Morality. As we begin to incorporate Large Language Models (LLMs) into our every day lives in the search boys of Bing and Google, it is important for us to understand both their potential and their limitations. These tools are not general AI. They do not inherently have common sense, rationality, or morality in a humanistic manner. Yet I would contend that the approximate and foster a pseudo common sense, rationality, and morality, structured on the content and the limitations of their coding. Because both models also learn from the user they are interacting with it will be increasingly necessary to verify that LLMs don’t lead us down rabbit holes of our own design. We must be careful that they are empowering tools rather than constraining or limiting human potential. It is too early at this point to make a definitive judgement on their future utility or potential for harm. Please read the responses by both LLMs below and feel free to comment with your thoughts below.

I previously posted an article in which I asked ChatGPT a number of questions on Russia’s war in Ukraine. It wasn’t immediately clear that ChatGPT had a cut off date in 2021. Yet despite the fact that it had a cut off date before the start of the 2022 escalation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine I was able to probe the logic of ChatGPT on complex issues pertaining to war and peace, diplomacy and related concepts. The answers were in many ways contradictory and dissatisfying.

Russia’s continued war in Ukraine has led to persistent calls for a diplomatic settlement from various corners of the policy community, academia, and the extremes of the political spectrum. These calls are each rooted in a limited or constrained understanding of the conflict, the provision of funding and resources, and the logics of peace and war. Calls for peace absent the agency of the Ukrainian people and their government amount to an imperial imposition of outcomes that would likely be neither permanent nor just. Understanding the context of the conflict from the Ukrainian perspective contextualizes the calls for an imperially imposed peace from without.