EAGER: Mining a Useable Past: Perspectives, Paradoxes, and Possibilities with Security and Privacy

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

Rapid evolution of digital and mobile technologies is simultaneously eroding personal privacy and creating a permanent need for increasingly secure systems, with major underlying shifts in the social, economic, and technical relationships between security and privacy that have been unfolding for four decades. Time is running out to record and preserve the histories of the pioneers who transformed privacy and security into interconnected, essential, and highly profitable ventures. This project aims to record and permanently preserve these pioneers’ histories by conducting and publishing thirty research-grade oral histories that will be permanently archived at the Charles Babbage Institute for Computing, Information, & Culture (CBI). The oral histories that will be recorded identify the intersectional forces that have shaped privacy and security today, by examining the technical, policy, and societal factors that have shaped the academic and industrial fields. The research creates a long-term infrastructure for future research in the history of privacy and security, which the project will achieve by publishing and permanently archiving the interviews at the online databases and physical holdings of CBI, world’s leading archive in the history of computing. Additionally, a book will synthesize the research, with a goal of being highly accessible and structured for widespread use as a course text in many fields—including history, sociology, computer science, STS, social informatics, communication, and legal studies—as well as to appeal to the general educated reader. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.