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Alissa Cooper
Chief Computer Scientist
Consumer Privacy

Alissa Cooper is the Chief Computer Scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Her work focuses on a range of issues including consumer privacy, network neutrality, and technical standards. She conducts research into the inner workings of common and emerging Internet technologies, and seeks to explain complex technical concepts in understandable terms. She has testified before Congress and the Federal Trade Commission and writes regularly on a variety of technology policy topics. She currently co-chairs the Geographic Location/Privacy working group (Geopriv) within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Alissa moved to the Washington area after completing her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science at Stanford University. There her work focused on computer security issues and their policy implications.

Publications:

Alissa Cooper is the Chief Computer Scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Her work focuses on a range of issues including consumer privacy, network neutrality, and technical standards. She conducts research into the inner workings of common and emerging Internet technologies, and seeks to explain complex technical concepts in understandable terms. She has testified before Congress and the Federal Trade Commission and writes regularly on a variety of technology policy topics. She currently co-chairs the Geographic Location/Privacy working group (Geopriv) within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Alissa moved to the Washington area after completing her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science at Stanford University. There her work focused on computer security issues and their policy implications.

Publications:

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Blog Post - Congestion Lessons from the World Cup
7/19/2010 Internet Openness & Standards

While soccer fans across the globe have been captivated with the excitement of the World Cup during the last month, vendors of DPI-based technologies have been casting their focus there as well. I recently came across a number of different vendor reports and musings (from Arbor, Allot, and Sandvine) about the impact of World Cup viewing on the Internet, and they got me thinking about the relationship between changes in Internet user behavior and application-specific congestion management.

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Blog Post - The Smell of Neutrality in the Air?
7/6/2010 Internet Openness & Standards

The entry was originally posted on alissacooper.com.

For most people, the arrival of summer means longer days, sunny vacations, and weekends spent around the barbecue. For telecommunications regulators, this summer has something else on the agenda: net neutrality. During the final two weeks of June, regulators in no less than four jurisdictions took major steps to address net neutrality in some fashion:

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Blog Post - The Privacy Risks of ISPs Using Deep Packet Inspection
7/1/2010 Security & Surveillance

Deep packet inspection (DPI) -- technology that potentially allows providers of Internet service to collect and analyze the Internet communications of millions of users simultaneously -- has been a hot topic in a number of different policy circles in recent years. In the privacy arena, ISPs’ use of DPI has drawn scathing criticism despite the fact that other kinds of service providers (like content delivery networks and web-based service providers) are capable of conducting content inspection. In a guest essay over at the Canadian DPI portal DeepPacketInspection.ca, I explore what separates ISPs from other kinds of service providers, and why their use of DPI can raise unique concerns:
 

There are several characteristics inherent to ISPs and their use of DPI that significantly increase the privacy stakes as compared to these other entities . . .. ISPs are uniquely situated in three respects: they serve as gateways to all Internet content, switching ISPs can be difficult for Internet users, and their use of a tool as powerful and versatile as DPI makes it prone to mission creep. An exploration of each of these factors reveals that they are difficult or impossible to mitigate. Taken together they form the fundamental basis for the heightened privacy alarm that has characterized DPI debates.

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Blog Post - Network Management News from All Corners
6/9/2010 Internet Openness & Standards

The past week has seen several important developments relating to how network operators manage the traffic on their networks. After several months of discussions, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) – one of the leading technical standards organizations for the Internet – officially chartered a new working group focusing on Congestion Exposure (CONEX). The purpose of CONEX is to create a mechanism that can inform network nodes about the congestion that packets are encountering on the network. As we explained around the time of the last IETF meeting,

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