About Me

Hello! My name is Yuka Hatori and I am a graduate student at Santa Clara University in the department of Computer Science and Engineering. I will be graduating June 2022. My interests include security, machine learning (ML), and human-computer interaction (HCI). This summer I worked, remotely, with Dr. Glencora Borradaile who is at Oregon State University.

About My Mentor

Glencora Borradaile believes that communication should be private and secure by default and worries about corporate and state threats to first-amendment protected activities. They are on the advisory board of the Civil Liberties Defense Center where they helped initiate and continue to build a Digital Security program to support activists and their lawyers. They have initiated a research program whose mission is to support the digital needs of activists, and ensure that everyone can communicate freely and safely, regardless of their identity.

In the past, Glencora’s research focused on traditional network flow and design problems in planar graphs and other sparse graphs. Their work in this area was recognized with an NSF CAREER award. They are an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Algorithms. They still do this work some of the time.

About My Project

For this project, I will be performing research on the Chilling Effect, which is the inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights by the threat of legal sanction. My first introduction to this topic was from Jonathon W. Penney’s work which delves into the subsequent effect of Edward Snowden leaking classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013. We will be categorizing different types of chilling and identifying the ways that the chilling effect influences the legal field, the engineering community, and society at large, as well as potential ways to perform studies in order to gather data. Further, we will be gathering evidence of chill effects on social media platform Twitter in regards to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Federal agents, as well as local police departments, have been utilizing social media monitoring toolsin order to gather intelligence on BLM protests. This surveillance could cause a chilling effecton protesters because protesters may opt to refrainfrom using social media or other insecure communication channels in order to avoid detection.

My Final Report

My Blog

My Blog