Madison Vialpando
Madison Vialpando (@madisonvialpan2) is a recent graduate from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2019 and 2020 , she worked as a student researcher and intern with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Threat Lab, compiling data on law enforcement technology along the U.S.-Mexico border. Her final research project focused on cybersecurity vulnerabilities in law enforcement agencies. Madison is currently a freelance journalist looking for new opportunities to scrutinize law enforcement and corporate surveillance.
Talks
When Cops Get Hacked: Lessons (Un)Learned from a Decade of Law Enforcement Breaches
More than 125 U.S. law enforcement agencies have suffered some form of hack or data breach over the last ten years. Journalism school graduate Madison Vialpando has been working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to build a dataset compiling all the ransomware, DDOS attacks, physical data theft, and servers and surveillance technologies exposed online. In this talk, she will explain how the dataset works, the trends revealed by the data, some of the most interesting case studies, and whether law enforcement is actually learning anything from these incidents. Dave Maass will talk about the Electronic Frontier Foundation's security research into automated license plate readers and other unsecured surveillance tech, while transparency activist Emma Best of Distributed Denial of Secrets will provide an overview of BlueLeaks - one of the largest dumps of internal police documents in history.