Bill Marczak’s work on Bahraini citizen surveillance

Bill Marczak, right, in NY Times

Bill Marczak, a PhD student in my group, does interesting research on algebraic programming languages, which I hope to describe in more detail here soon.

But Bill has recently received significant attention for work he did in his spare time—a dramatically successful cyber-espionage effort to expose government misuse of commercial surveillance software in Bahrain, the nation where Bill attended high school. The story picked up major press coverage in venues including Bloomberg and the New York Times, which also ran a more detailed article in their Bits Blog.

I’m always happy to see the press pick up on my students’ work, but this one is special.