Presented by: Ahmed Ghappour

Ahmed Ghappour is General Counsel at Nym Technologies and Professor at Boston University, where he teaches Cybersecurity Law, Privacy Law, and Criminal Law. Before his current roles, Ghappour built law clinics at UT Austin and UC Hastings to litigate national security and hacking cases. He litigated the first criminal trial to challenge bulk metadata collection by the NSA, sued the CIA on behalf of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and represented digital causes célèbres such as Chelsea Manning, Ross Ulbricht, and Barrett Brown. Before that, Ghappour represented Guantanamo prisoners at Reprieve UK, and litigated patent cases with a top law firm. In a prior life, Ghappour was a software engineer at Silicon Graphics, Inc. and Sun Microsystems. He’s an alum of NYU Law and Rutgers Engineering.

Description:

The Nym mixnet is a new privacy infrastructure for an anonymous overlay software to resist mass surveillance. Like a VPN, it is compatible with generic internet apps. In contrast to a VPN and Tor, even a global passive adversary that has a "God’s eye view" cannot determine who sent a message over Nym to whom. We will review the design and codebase, and demonstrate its usage for use-cases such as e-mail and instant messaging, as well as how to run your own mix mode on GNU/Linux to provision privacy - and freedom - for others.

Slides

Video version