Censored Planet researcher joins FTC

Hieu Le has been a postdoctoral research fellow at CSE who worked within Prof. Roya Ensafi’s Censored Planet group from October 2023 until this month. Hieu has just departed Michigan for a position in Washington DC at the US Federal Trade Commission.

Before he left town, we spoke with Hieu about his goals and motivations for joining the FTC and his work with Censored Planet. Here are highlights from that conversation.

What will your new role be at the FTC?

Hieu: My role at the FTC will be as a Senior Technology Advisor  at their Office of Technology. I will participate in agency law enforcement investigations and research initiatives to assist in consumer protection and to ensure fair competition. This will include strengthening and supporting law enforcement actions, advising and engaging with FTC staff on policy and research initiatives, and engaging the public and relevant experts to understand and advance the FTC’s work. 

The Office of Technology has created research competitions, such as the recent challenge that explores approaches to protecting consumers against potential harms from AI voice cloning; and participated in workshops that interfaces with academia, such as the recent “Maximizing Your Research Impact: A Conversation with the FTC’s Office of Technology” with the Knight-Georgetown Institute.

How did your work at Censored Planet help to prepare you for the FTC?

Hieu: As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, I collaborated with Prof. Ensafi’s Censored Planet team to develop systems and methodologies to improve the detection of censorship content and events. This is crucial to understanding how affected netizens can bypass censorship, and to better characterize the state of internet freedom. 

One of the things that I really enjoyed about working with Prof. Ensafi and the entire team at Censored Planet was that Prof. Ensafi takes a global view of things, whereas my previous work was more focused on the US and data collection practices in the US. There are many more challenges on a global scale, and Censored Planet has discovered previously undetected censorship events in unexpected places.

It has been very rewarding and educational to be able to apply my expertise in not only the user privacy space but also in the anti-censorship space with Prof. Ensafi.

What’s appealing to you about the FTC? How does this role fit with your long-term plans?

Hieu: I am a researcher and ultimately an aspiring faculty member. I also have strong feelings about user privacy and how users can access the internet. I think it’s a fundamental right to access the internet and to have privacy while doing so.

I am thrilled to bring my technical expertise in automated systems, networking, and applied machine learning to the FTC, where I can contribute to its mission for consumer protection and to promote competition. I am also excited to assist in identifying and investigating emerging problems that consumers face. 

Working for the FTC enables me to generate impact on the policy side, while also placing me at the forefront of investigating critical issues that consumers face. In addition, this work will be a good way to understand the problems that consumers face in order to inform my future research efforts.

More about Hieu:

Hieu Le received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Irvine in 2023 and has a background in software engineering using web and cloud technologies. 

As a graduate student researcher at UC Irvine, advised by Athina Markopoulou, he developed automated systems to explore websites and applications of smart TVs and Oculus VR platforms, while collecting their network traffic to audit data collection practices. His work revealed the exfiltration of personally identifiable information (PII), such as serial numbers, and data types, such as the user agent and OS version, that can be leveraged to create fingerprints and track users. To protect users and their privacy, he created frameworks based on reinforcement learning to improve the robustness of privacy-enhancing technologies, such as ad blockers. 

His work has been published at top security and privacy venues such as USENIX Security, NDSS, and PETS. It has been featured at PrivacyCon (hosted by the FTC), the Ad-Filtering Developer Summit, and privacy-focused industry players, such as Duck Duck Go. 

Beyond his professional endeavors, Hieu Le has contributed to educational outreach initiatives, including creating a curriculum to study TikTok’s data collection practices for undergraduates at the Privacy and IoT Research Exploration Workshop, hosted by the ProperData NSF Frontier project.

More about Censored Planet:

Founded by Prof. Roya Ensafi in 2018, Censored Planet is an internet censorship observatory that collects data from more than 200 countries. Its mission is to provide a comprehensive, publicly available window into the worldwide censorship tactics used by governments and others, advancing online transparency and accountability. 

Ultimately, Prof. Ensafi’s goal is to advance efforts to provide an equitable and connected internet so that users everywhere have equal access to the same information.

Censored Planet utilizes advanced network side channels to collect data from thousands of vantage points outside of censored areas to determine when access to websites is being blocked. Running continuously, it takes billions of automated measurements and then uses a series of tools and filters to analyze the data, removing noise and teasing out trends. By further analyzing the information that comes back, the tools that Enafi’s team are developing can determine how those addresses are being blocked.

Censored Planet’s constant, automated monitoring is a departure from traditional approaches that rely on volunteers to collect data manually from inside the countries being monitored. Manual monitoring can be dangerous for volunteers, who may face reprisals from governments. The limited scope of these approaches also means that efforts are often focused on countries already known for censorship, enabling nations that are perceived as freer to fly under the radar.