Research

I am actively researching the role of information flow in the detection and prevention of US domestic terrorist attacks, with a particular interest in the impact of privacy laws, norms and privacy enhancing technologies. It is my growing belief that privacy mechanisms, when used in the proper context, can, contrary to the common wisdom, greatly enhance the efficiency of domestic intelligence institutions.

Much of my recent work has focused on the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, a federal program to make more direct use of state and local police and local citizens in the practice of domestic intelligence. A chapter describing the program from a privacy perspective is in the upcoming (v. 19) Research and Social Problems and Public Policy. Another journal article coming out this year in the International Journal of Intelligence Ethics. I have a public website which currently archives and indexes many of the documents I have gathered, including NGO reports, government documents, blogs and mainstream media reports.

My dissertation “Suspect until Proven Guilty, a problematization of state dossier systems via two case studies: the United States and China,” examines the driving factors and popular resistance against the production, collection and aggregation of personal information by nation states.

I have a long standing interest in cases where electronic communication technologies appear to endanger human rights. During my time working with the Electronic Privacy Information Center I worked on issues related to electronic voting and RFID, and designed and produced the website for the National Committee on Voting Integrity, still a useful site for getting up to speed with the electronic voting issue. I have done a significant amount of work researching the impact of the Internet and other network communication technology on the People’s Republic of China. In the early days of the Internet in China, my web site, the China Matrix (link to archived version), was considered an “essential” destination for China Internet by the WWW Internet Library.

While working on my degree, I took a great interest in cybernetics, information theory, and network analysis. See my work, Web Graph Analysis in Perspective: Description and Evaluation in terms of Krippendorff’s Conceptual Framework for Content Analysis. I developed a research site supporting the web graph analysis work. It is no longer active, but can be found at http://www.farrall.org/webgraph/home.html. Another research project related to by interest in cybernetics, ICTs, and social systems was the development of a Database of Electronic Communication and Destabilization.