Carola Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco and Irina Todorova, Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, 440 pp., $29.95 hb. (IS...

Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society

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It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

In the United States, there is nothing new about whistle-blowers who provided public knowledge of government-led surveillance. In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, released numero...

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, The NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States

Mobile payment services hold the potential for financial inclusion in developing economies. Low-income countries are characterized by distinctive conditions like price sensitivity, low digital pene...

Contextual facilitators and barriers influencing the continued use of mobile payment services in a developing country: insights from adopters in India

Undocumented immigrants in the United States face risks of discrimination, surveillance, and deportation. We investigate their technology use, risk perceptions, and protective strategies relating to their vulnerability. Through semi-structured interviews with Latinx undocumented immigrants, we find that while participants act to address offline threats, this vigilance does not translate to their online activities. Their technology use is shaped by needs and benefits rather than risk perceptions. While our participants are concerned about identity theft and privacy generally, and some raise concerns about online harassment, their understanding of government surveillance risks is vague and met with resignation. We identify tensions among self-expression, group privacy, and self-censorship related to their immigration status, as well as strong trust in service providers. Our findings have implications for digital literacy education, privacy and security interfaces, and technology design in general. Even minor design decisions can substantially affect exposure risks and well-being for such vulnerable communities.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3173574.3173688

Keeping a Low Profile?: Technology, Risk and Privacy among Undocumented Immigrants

Remote censorship measurement tools can now detect DNSand IP-based blocking at global scale. However, a major unmonitored form of interference is blocking triggered by deep packet inspection of application-layer data. We close this gap by introducing Quack, a scalable, remote measurement system that can efficiently detect application-layer interference. We show that Quack can effectively detect applicationlayer blocking triggered on HTTP and TLS headers, and it is flexible enough to support many other diverse protocols. In experiments, we test for blocking across 4458 autonomous systems, an order of magnitude larger than provided by country probes used by OONI. We also test a corpus of 100,000 keywords from vantage points in 40 countries to produce detailed national blocklists. Finally, we analyze the keywords we find blocked to provide insight into the application-layer blocking ecosystem and compare countries’ behavior. We find that the most consistently blocked services are related to circumvention tools, pornography, and gambling, but that there is significant country-to-country variation.

/pdf/quack-scalable-remote-measurement-of-application-layer-4yjlzk1mep.pdf

Quack: Scalable Remote Measurement of Application-Layer Censorship

We report the first wide-scale measurement study of server-side geographic restriction, or geoblocking, a phenomenon in which server operators intentionally deny access to users from particular countries or regions. Many sites practice geoblocking due to legal requirements or other business reasons, but excessive blocking can needlessly deny valuable content and services to entire national populations. To help researchers and policymakers understand this phenomenon, we develop a semi-automated system to detect instances where whole websites were rendered inaccessible due to geoblocking. By focusing on detecting geoblocking capabilities offered by large CDNs and cloud providers, we can reliably distinguish the practice from dynamic anti-abuse mechanisms and network-based censorship. We apply our techniques to test for geoblocking across the Alexa Top 10K sites from thousands of vantage points in 177 countries. We then expand our measurement to a sample of CDN customers in the Alexa Top 1M. We find that geoblocking occurs across a broad set of countries and sites. We observe geoblocking in nearly all countries we study, with Iran, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, and Russia experiencing the highest rates. These countries experience particularly high rates of geoblocking for finance and banking sites, likely as a result of U.S. economic sanctions. We also verify our measurements with data provided by Cloudflare, and find our observations to be accurate.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3278532.3278552

403 Forbidden: A Global View of CDN Geoblocking

Ballot marking devices (BMDs) allow voters to select candidates on a computer kiosk, which prints a paper ballot that the voter can review before inserting it into a scanner to be tabulated. Unlike paperless voting machines, BMDs provide voters an opportunity to verify an auditable physical record of their choices, and a growing number of U.S. jurisdictions are adopting them for all voters. However, the security of BMDs depends on how reliably voters notice and correct any adversarially induced errors on their printed ballots. In order to measure voters’ error detection abilities, we conducted a large study (N = 241) in a realistic polling place setting using real voting machines that we modified to introduce an error into each printout. Without intervention, only 40% of participants reviewed their printed ballots at all, and only 6.6% told a poll worker something was wrong. We also find that carefully designed interventions can improve verification performance. Verbally instructing voters to review the printouts and providing a written slate of candidates for whom to vote both significantly increased review and reporting rates—although the improvements may not be large enough to provide strong security in close elections, especially when BMDs are used by all voters. Based on these findings, we make several evidence-based recommendations to help better defend BMD-based elections.

/pdf/can-voters-detect-malicious-manipulation-of-ballot-marking-3o0txotyof.pdf

Can Voters Detect Malicious Manipulation of Ballot Marking Devices

How do people in a precarious profession leverage technology to grow their business and improve their quality of life? Sex workers sit at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities and make up a sizeable workforce: the United Nations estimates that at least 42 million sex workers are conducting business across the globe. Yet, little research has examined how well technology fulfills sex workers’ business needs in the face of unique social, political, legal, and safety constraints. We present interviews with 29 sex workers in Germany and Switzerland where such work is legal, offering a first HCI perspective on this population’s use of technology. While our participants demonstrate savvy navigation of online spaces, sex workers encounter frustrating barriers due to an American-dominated internet that enforces puritan values globally. Our findings raise concerns about digital discrimination against sex workers and suggest concrete directions for the design of more inclusive technology.

/pdf/disadvantaged-in-the-american-dominated-internet-sex-work-4nkdas3fmx.pdf

Allison McDonald

Papers

Keeping a Low Profile?: Technology, Risk and Privacy among Undocumented Immigrants

Quack: Scalable Remote Measurement of Application-Layer Censorship

403 Forbidden: A Global View of CDN Geoblocking

Can Voters Detect Malicious Manipulation of Ballot Marking Devices

“Disadvantaged in the American-dominated Internet”: Sex, Work, and Technology