Deep Throat is one of the most famous anonymous newspaper sources in American journalism. He is known for helping Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's impeachment and resignation in 1974. Deep Throat's identity was a source of curiosity until he was revealed in 2005 as the former number two figure at the FBI, William Mark Felt. This thesis will show that, despite Felt's notoriety, Deep Throat was not an indispensable part of Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate coverage, speaking with Woodward 16 times about Watergate during the reporters' coverage. Deep Throat was important to the Watergate story because he kept it alive. Deep Throat inspired numerous publications, which all served to create his mythic status. Many attempted to guess his true identity, although Woodward and Bernstein refused to confirm most guesses. An enduring Deep Throat legacy is that his nickname has become synonymous with deep background - a source that cannot be quoted or named. There was no clear consensus as to how people felt about Felt's role as Deep Throat. There were many negative and positive reactions when he revealed himself. His family sided with him; Nixon associates were unhappy with him. However, more than 30 years after the Watergate scandal, Deep Throat was still big news. No matter what people thought about him, they paid attention and they knew the story.

The main idea is to make a short film about mobile technologies and the changing relationships between us and the public space under the age of these technologies. Some people might blame those mobile technologies like smart phones for separating us from each other. In my view, however, we cannot ask those technologies to take all the responsibilities, because new technologies will not be put into the market unless the society needs them. These technologies do change our perceptions on the public space in some ways, but there must be some deeper reasons behind. Based on the analogy of mobile technologies to "interfaces" to the environment like our skins, bodies and clothes, we are able to rethink the role of these technologies and our relationships with them and the public space. In big cities full of stimulations and strangers, we are always looking for different types of "filters" to help us control our experiences in order not to be too overwhelmed by the endless information. Living without these "filters" is like being naked in the wild field, which means we cannot control what we see, what we hear and what we touch. In the film, there are two story lines in parallel: one is about the overwhelming stimulations and anonymous individuals using mobiles technologies in public spaces; the other is about one person walking in the wood, stripping down clothes until being naked. By asking the question in the beginning and the end "what does it mean to be naked", I wish eachaudience could rethink the interrelationships between us, mobile technologies and public spaces.

”Spiritus contra spiritum” - En religionspsykologisk studie avomvändelseprocesser hos medlemmar i Anonyma Alkoholister(”Spiritus contra spiritum” - A religious psychological study on transformation processesamong members of Alcoholics Anonymous)The purpose of this study was to understand and illustrate the conversion processes forpeople who have attained sobriety through membership in Alcoholics Anonymous. My aimwas to ascertain how the interviewees constructed their life story regarding their path tosobriety. I sought to learn how "God" as a function, a central tenet of AlcoholicsAnonymous, served the interviewees in achieving and maintaining sobriety. Dan P.McAdams’s (1993) The stories we live by: personal myths and making of the self, providedthe theoretical tools. Steinar Kvale´s (1997) The qualitative research interview provided themethod. The conclusion was that membership in Alcoholics Anonymous allowed theinformants a sense of healing, conversion and reconciliation from their earlier alcohol abuse.Through this confident community the informants were provided with the narrative meansto improve their life story and truth by a renewed identity and spiritual awakening.Keywords:

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<p>Secure multi-party computation (MPC) enables mutually distrusting parties to compute securely over their private data. It is a natural approach for building distributed applications with strong privacy guarantees, and it has been used in more and more real-world privacy-preserving solutions such as privacy-preserving machine learning, secure financial analysis, and secure auctions.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The typical method of MPC is to represent the function with arithmetic circuits or binary circuits, then MPC can be applied to compute each gate privately. The practicality of secure multi-party computation (MPC) has been extensively analyzed and improved over the past decade, however, we are hitting the limits of efficiency with the traditional approaches as the circuits become more complicated. Therefore, we follow the design principle of identifying and constructing fast and provably-secure MPC protocols to evaluate useful high-level algebraic abstractions; thus, improving the efficiency of all applications relying on them. </p> <p><br></p> <p>To begin with, we construct an MPC protocol to efficiently evaluate the powers of a secret value. Then we use it as a building block to form a secure mixing protocol, which can be directly used for anonymous broadcast communication. We propose two different protocols to achieve secure mixing offering different tradeoffs between local computation and communication. Meanwhile, we study the necessity of robustness and fairness in many use cases, and provide these properties to general MPC protocols. As a follow-up work in this direction, we design more efficient MPC protocols for anonymous communication through the use of permutation matrices. We provide three variants targeting different MPC frameworks and input volumes. Besides, as the core of our protocols is a secure random permutation, our protocol is of independent interest to more applications such as secure sorting and secure two-way communication.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Meanwhile, we propose the solution and analysis for another useful arithmetic operation: secure multi-variable high-degree polynomial evaluation over both scalar and matrices. Secure polynomial evaluation is a basic operation in many applications including (but not limited to) privacy-preserving machine learning, secure Markov process evaluation, and non-linear function approximation. In this work, we illustrate how our protocol can be used to efficiently evaluate decision tree models, with both the client input and the tree models being private. We implement the prototypes of this idea and the benchmark shows that the polynomial evaluation becomes significantly faster and this makes the secure comparison the only bottleneck. Therefore, as a follow-up work, we design novel protocols to evaluate secure comparison efficiently with the help of pre-computed function tables. We implement and test this idea using Falcon, a state-of-the-art privacy-preserving machine learning framework and the benchmark results illustrate that we get significant performance improvement by simply replacing their secure comparison protocol with ours.</p> <p><br></p>

The purpose of this study was to describe, analyze, and better understand the lived experiences of women age 50 and older in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Guiding this inquiry were the following research questions: 1) How do the older women participants experience the AA program? 2) What aspects of AA do older women consider beneficial? 3) What aspects of AA do older women consider detrimental? 4) What do older women consider as important conditions to succeed in the AA program? 5) How did these older women elicit meaning in their involvement with AA? and 6) How was the narrative aspect of AA experienced by the participants? Fourteen older women from AA meetings in Southwest Virginia participated in two qualitative interviews. The results were represented by narrative descriptions of each participan's experiences and analyzed for common themes across the stories, which were presented and discussed. For these participants, the AA program was found to intersect with narrative therapy. AA, like narrative therapy, highlights deconstructing and re-authoring life stories through personal narratives. Storytelling itself proved to be among the most important traditions of AA and a core benefit to the storyteller (and to a lesser extent, the listener). Study participants found that telling their stories allowed for 1) a way to give back to the program, 2) a feeling of belonging to the group, 3) a welcome reminder to the speaker of her past struggles with alcoholism, and 4) a spiritual experience. Many of the women articulated their early concerns with publicly sharing at meetings, as well as their ongoing considerations of boundaries, over-sharing, and conflicts of interest in storytelling. Finally, in an unexpected finding, the women cultivated and maintained intimate friendships with other women in AA that addressed relevant issues beyond sobriety including everyday needs and life challenges. Social activities often transcended the boundaries of the meetings. / Ph. D.

Recent advances in spectrum access technologies, such as software-defined radios, have made dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) a viable option for addressing the spectrum shortage problem. However, these advances have also contributed to the increased possibility of "rogue" transmitter radios which may cause significant interference to other radios in DSS. One approach for countering such threats is to employ a transmitter authentication scheme at the physical (PHY) layer. In PHY-layer authentication, an authentication signal is generated by the transmitter, and embedded into the message signal. This enables a regulatory enforcement entity to extract the authentication signal from the received signal, uniquely identify a transmitter, and collect verifiable evidence of a rogue transmission that can be used later during an adjudication process. There are two primary technical challenges in devising a transmitter authentication scheme for DSS: (1) how to generate and verify the authentication signal such that the required security and privacy criteria are met; and (2) how to embed and extract the authentication signal without negatively impacting the performance of the transmitters and the receivers in DSS. With regard to dealing with the first challenge, the authentication schemes in the prior art, which provide privacy-preserving authentication, have limited practical value for use in large networks due to the high computational complexity of their revocation check procedures. In this dissertation, the novel approaches which significantly improve scalability of the transmitter authentication with respect to revocation, are proposed. With regard to dealing with the second challenge, in the existing PHY-layer authentication techniques, the authentication signal is embedded into the message signal in such a way that the authentication signal appears as noise to the message signal and vice versa. Hence, existing schemes are constrained by a fundamental tradeoff between the message signal's signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) and the authentication signal's SINR. In this dissertation, the novel approaches which are not constrained by the aforementioned tradeoff between message and authentication signals, are proposed. / Ph. D. / Recent advances in spectrum access technologies, such as software-defined radios, have made dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) a viable option for addressing the spectrum shortage problem. However, these advances have also contributed to the increased possibility of “rogue” transmitter radios which may cause significant interference to other radios in DSS. One approach for countering such threats is to employ a <i>transmitter authentication</i> scheme at the physical (PHY) layer. In PHY-layer authentication, an authentication signal is generated by the transmitter, and embedded into the message signal. This enables a regulatory enforcement entity to extract the authentication signal from the received signal, uniquely identify a transmitter, and collect verifiable evidence of a rogue transmission that can be used later during an adjudication process. There are two primary technical challenges in devising a transmitter authentication scheme for DSS: (1) how to generate and verify the authentication signal such that the required security and privacy criteria are met; and (2) how to embed and extract the authentication signal without negatively impacting the performance of the transmitters and the receivers in DSS. With regard to dealing with the first challenge, the authentication schemes in the prior art, which provide privacy-preserving authentication, have limited practical value for use in large networks due to the high computational complexity of their revocation check procedures. In this dissertation, the novel approaches which significantly improve scalability of the transmitter authentication with respect to revocation, are proposed. With regard to dealing with the second challenge, in the existing PHY-layer authentication techniques, the authentication signal is embedded into the message signal in such a way that the authentication signal appears as noise to the message signal and vice versa. Hence, existing schemes are constrained by a fundamental tradeoff between the message signal’s signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) and the authentication signal’s SINR. In this dissertation, the novel approaches which are not constrained by the aforementioned tradeoff between message and authentication signals, are proposed.

Diese Arbeit verbindet zwei Perspektiven, nämlich den Blick auf die soziale Praxis des digitalen Ungehorsams mit dem anhaltenden Diskurs über zivilen Ungehorsam in der politischen Theorie. Digitaler Ungehorsam entwickelte sich im Verlauf der Evolution digitaler Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien in überraschendem Facettenreichtum: vom BTX Hack des Chaos Computer Clubs über den Widerstand der Cypherpunks für die weltweite Verbreitung von Verschlüsselung hin zu Anonymous, Aaron Swartz und Edward Snowden. Reload Disobedience plädiert für eine Revision des dominierenden Verständnisses von zivilem Ungehorsam und stützt sich dabei auf Theorien von Hannah Arendt, Michael Walzer und Etienne Balibar. Viele Beispiele in der Geschichte des digitalen Ungehorsams werden diesem neuen Verständnis durchaus gerecht, doch gibt es gleichzeitig Faktoren, die weitere Fragen aufwerfen: Kann ziviler Ungehorsam anonym sein oder automatisiert durchgeführt werden? Wie verändert sich das kollektive Handeln, das maßgeblicher Teil der Tradition zivilen Ungehorsames ist, durch die globale Vernetzung? Um diese und andere Effekte digitalen Handelns zu verstehen, diskutiert die Autorin die Entscheidungen der digital Ungehorsamen sowie Möglichkeiten und Grenzen digitalen Handelns im Kontext demokratie-theoretischer Überlegungen. Eine Kernthese der Arbeit ist, dass ziviler Ungehorsam in digitalen Formen potentiell eine neue Direktheit des Politischen erzeugen kann. Gleichzeitig muss sich diese Praxis einer besonderen Unsicherheit sowie neuen Risiken und Herausforderungen stellen, um dem demokratischen Geist des zivilen Ungehorsams unter neuen Bedingungen gerecht zu werden. / This work combines two perspectives, namely the social and activist history of digital forms of disobedience with the ongoing discourse around civil disobedience in political theory. In the course of the internet’s evolution, digital disobedience developed in a surprisingly multifaceted nature: From cases like the BTX Hack of the Chaos Computer Club, to the Cypherpunks and their effort to spread encryption, from Anonymous to Aaron Swartz or Edward Snowden. This work argues for a broader understanding of civil disobedience than the mainstream in political thinking suggests based on arguments from a radical democratic line of thinking, inspired by Hannah Arendt, Michael Walzer and Etienne Balibar. Many cases of digital disobedience meet the spirit of this new understanding, while at the same time their digital nature provokes a new set of questions as well. For instance the question, if civil disobedience may be anonymous or even automated. How does the internet change collective action which is often seen as a core element of the tradition of civil disobedience? The author discusses the choices and principles behind digitally disobedient action as well as the possibilities and limits of digital action in the context of democratic theory. She shows that civil disobedience in digital action even develops a new directness of encounter that adds a new potential to this delicate form of political action. Nevertheless, digital practices of civil disobedience are at the same time precarious and faced with new risks and challenges, like automation of and the risk of elitist tech-avant-gardes overriding the democratic spirit that civil disobedience is rooted in.

CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeÃoamento de Pessoal de NÃvel Superior / A presente Tese, intitulada âMovimentos de protestos virtuais da Anonymous no Brasil: unidos como um e divididos por fakesâ, apresenta um estudo analÃtico da Rede de Protestos Anonymous, desde seus primÃrdios, no site 4chan, atà os protestos contra a Copa do Mundo no Brasil - 2014, tendo como Ãpice as ManifestaÃÃes de Junho de 2013, nas quais a Anonymous teve influente participaÃÃo, tanto por meio de prÃticas de ativismo online quanto em aÃÃes diretas, offline. O ideÃrio Anonymous à caracterizado por uma forma de luta polÃtica que objetiva alcanÃar a emancipaÃÃo humana por meio da hiperdemocracia, tecnocracia, total liberdade de expressÃo, informaÃÃo e comunicaÃÃo. O processo de conquista deste ideÃrio se daria pela prÃtica de novos modelos de mobilizaÃÃes sociais, ou seja, por um processo educativo autÃnomo, autovigilante, anÃnimo, que se desenvolveria num movimento horizontal, sem lideranÃas, sem interferÃncias de partidos polÃticos e sem ideologias. Este modelo se diferencia da forma de luta polÃtica do sÃculo XX, caracterizada pela tradicional dicotomia entre esquerda e direita, movimentos com lideranÃas verticalizadas, personalistas e guiadas por tendÃncias ideolÃgicas explÃcitas. No intuito de compreender o desenvolvimento das aÃÃes de protestos Anonymous no Brasil, utilizou-se como base empÃrica de pesquisa diversas fontes virtuais, tais como pÃginas do Facebook e canais do Youtube das cÃlulas de Anonymous no Brasil e exterior, alÃm de observaÃÃo dos protestos de rua, âOperaÃÃo 7 de setembroâ e a âOperaÃÃo NÃo vai ter Copaâ, e entrevistas com ativistas Anonymous. O processo de anÃlise das fontes foi ponderado pelo estudo dos conteÃdos e das diversas formas de linguagens utilizadas nas aÃÃes ciberativistas. Verificou-se que o desenvolvimento da luta polÃtica com base no ideÃrio Anonymous, na medida em que se propÃs a romper com o modelo tradicional de movimento polÃtico, apesar de agregar significativo nÃmero de ativistas, o ideÃrio Anonymous nÃo foi compreendido pela maioria de seus seguidores e ativistas. A prÃpria forma de criaÃÃo das cÃlulas Anonymous no Brasil teve um inÃcio desvirtuado, tendo sido conduzido de modo verticalizado, em cujo anonimato permitiu que os ativistas seguissem planos estabelecidos por pequenos grupos ou organizaÃÃes desconhecidas, bem como a apropriaÃÃo das cÃlulas Anonymous por fakes, que conduziram determinadas mobilizaÃÃes orientadas por interesses polÃticos, partidÃrios e ideolÃgicos. Tal fato resultou em divisÃes, rupturas e denÃncias por partes de algumas cÃlulas. Por exemplo, a Anonymous FUEL, que continuou ativa, mas com uma postura vigilante em relaÃÃo ao ideÃrio Anonymous, bem como as cÃlulas Anonymous Paranà e Anonymous Curitiba, que se declararam inativas, dadas a deturpaÃÃo de ativistas Anonymous que passaram a assumir causas militaristas e golpistas. Para fins deste estudo, a metodologia utilizada teve como referÃncia a anÃlise de discurso de Bakhtin (2002) e Ducrot (1987). Para temas que permeiam o estudo, como o ciberespaÃo, hackerativismo, pÃs-modernidade e movimentos sociais, utilizou-se como base teÃrica as contribuiÃÃes de Castells (2003), LÃvy (1999), Melucci (1989), Tilly (1978), Vegh (2003), Harvey (2008), Santos (2000), (2002), Giddens (1991) e Beck (2000). / This thesis, entitled "Movement of virtual protests by the Anonymous in Brazil: united as one and divided by fakes," presents an analytical evaluation of the Anonymous Protests Network, since its inception, in the site 4chan, to show dissent against the World Cup Brazil - 2014, having reached its peak in the June 2013 Demonstrations, in which Anonymous had influential participation, either through online activism practices as in direct actions offline. The ideology supporting Anonymous is characterized by a form of political struggle which aims at achieving human emancipation through hiper-democracy, technocracy and complete freedom of expression, information and communication. The process of a successful establishment of these ideas would take place through the practice of new models of social mobilization, that is, by an autonomous educational process - self-vigilant, anonymous - which would develop a horizontal movement without leaders, without interference from political parties and without ideologies. This model differs from the political form of struggle of the twentieth century, characterized by the traditional split between left and right movements with leaders in a personality vertical hierarchal power line, guided by explicit ideological tendencies. In order to understand the development of the Anonymous protest actions in Brazil, it was used as a empirical research base several virtual sources such as Facebook pages and YouTube channels of Anonymous cells in Brazil and abroad, as well as observation of street protests, such as "Operation September 7" and "Operation No World Cup", besides interviews with Anonymous activists. The process of analysis of the sources was weighted by the study of the contents and the various forms of languages used in the actions of cyberactivists. It was found that the development of political struggles based on ideas spawned by Anonymous, as far as it proposes to break the traditional model of political action, in spite of counting with significant number of activists, the Anonymous ideology was not understood by most of his followers and activists. The very form of creating Anonymous cells in Brazil had a distorted start and was conducted in vertical fashion, anonymity allowing activists to follow plans established by small groups or unknown organizations, as well as appropriation of Anonymous cells by fakes, which led to certain mobilizations guided by political interests of a partisan and ideological nature. This fact resulted in divisions, ruptures and complaints by parts of some cells. As an example of this situation one can cite Anonymous FUEL, which remained active, but with a vigilant stance on Anonymous ideology, and two other branches, Anonymous Paranà and Anonymous Curitiba, which declared themselves inactive, given misrepresentation of Anonymous ideas by other cells that assumed militarist causes and defended a coup dâÃtat in Brazil. For this study, the methodology used had as reference discourse analysis of Bakhetin (2002) and Ducrot (1987). For themes that permeate the study, such as cyberspace, hacktivism, postmodernism and social movements, it was used as a theoretical basis the contributions of Castells (1999), Levy (1999), Melucci (1989), Tilly (1978), Vegh (2003), Harvey (2008), Santos (2000), (2002), Giddens (1991) and Beck (2000).