Georgetown Law
Technology Review

The Russian attacks on voter registration databases preceding the 2016 Election “changed the narrative” about election security, highlighting a new avenue for adversarial foreign nation-states to interfere with the U.S.’s elections: the cyberattack. This Technology Explainer will analyze how cyberattacks function in elections, which election systems are most vulnerable to these attacks, and how cyberattacks […]

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is an emerging new spectrum of technologies focused on revolutionizing how data is stored. While often discussed in tandem with cryptocurrencies, not all DLTs are cryptocurrencies; instead the term DLT covers any approach to data storage across multiple ledgers. A ledger is a record of ownership and what is exchanged in […]

Bitcoin off-chain transactions are transactions in bitcoin that are not recorded on the blockchain. Today, most bitcoin transactions occur off-chain. This dynamic runs counter to the quintessential principle espoused in the initial white paper conceptualizing bitcoin—that transactions would be immutably and reliably recorded on a public ledger. As regulators voice concerns over bitcoin’s divorce from […]

Election technology is democracy’s critical infrastructure and must withstand manipulation from inside and outside forces. But in recent years, contested recounts have raised procedural questions. Reports issued on Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election reveal other system vulnerabilities. Security experts and the House of Representatives have called for a return to paper ballots. […]

In 2006, when Netflix was just a DVD rental service, it offered a $1 million prize to the team that could improve Netflix’s movie recommendation algorithm by ten percent. The competition became an academic lightning rod—thousands of teams entered and their work produced dozens of academic works. During the first year of the competition, several […]

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique to improve the ranking of a website on the results page of a search engine for the purpose of increasing the traffic to that site. This technique has become crucial in the modern Internet era, where standing out amongst the over 1.7 billion websites can be a challenge. […]

Spam, unsolicited commercial content spread at a mass scale, is everywhere on the Internet, in our email and on the sites we visit. At a minimum, spam is a nuisance, just another email or post online to delete or ignore. At its worst, falling victim to a spam attack risks infecting a system with malware […]

To say that data breaches are ubiquitous within the modern digital society may be an understatement. Over the past fifteen years, more than ten billion records have been breached from over 9,000 data breaches in the United States, impacting a majority of Americans. Continue Reading

Wireless communication technology is about to enter a new era: 5G networks. “5G” stands for “fifth generation,” the next step up from the currently mainstream 4G networks. From 2014 levels, mobile traffic is expected to increase by 1000 times by 2024. Continue Reading

In 2001, a U.S. military drone, Predator, became the first weapon to stalk and kill an individual on the other side of the planet. Controlled from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) campus in Virginia, the Predator hovered over a compound in Afghanistan, which housed Mullah Mohammed Omar, an ally of Osama Bin Laden. The Predator […]