CBI Awarded Major NSF Privacy and Security grant
Early in 2022 we received the tremendous news that our grant proposal to the National Science Foundation’s Secure and Trustworthy Computing Program was funded in full for $300,000. The project is entitled, “Mining a Useable Past: Perspectives, Paradoxes, and Possibilities in Security and Privacy.” In the 2012-2015, CBI did a project on Computer Security, led by Tom Misa and me. This new project I am serving as PI and am thrilled to be collaborating in leading this with Co-PI University of California, Davis STS Associate Professor Gerardo Con Diaz. A summary of the project, the official abstract, follows.
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).
Yost and Con Diaz assembled a stellar team of advisors that will greatly aid this project through their guidance, connections, and insights. The Advisory Board consists of:
- Dr. Matt Bishop is Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Davis.
- Dr. Lorrie Cranor is Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy and Dir. of the CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University.
- Dr. Deborah Frincke is Associate Laboratory Director for National Security Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
- Ms. Rebecca Herold is the Founder and Principal of Rebecca Herold and Associates, LLC (The Privacy Professor-TM).
- Dr. Eugene Spafford is Professor of Computer Science, Purdue University, and Founding Director, Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS).
The oral histories that will be recorded identify the intersectional forces that have shaped privacy and security today. 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. 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.
Jeffrey R. Yost
Twtr: @JustCodeCulture