R. Miles McCain

Stanford Internet Observatory

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 17:14:47 -0400

Since October 2020, I’ve worked at the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) as a technical research assistant. I’ve worked on a combination of technical infrastructure, research projects, and investigations.

CISA

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 17:14:47 -0400

From December 2022 to March 2023, I worked at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) inside National Risk Management Center (NRMC). I worked on election security and risk management. It was a fantastic experience.

Apple

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 03:44:30 +0000

During the summer of 2022, I worked on privacy at Apple, as part of the Privacy Engineering team. It was an amazing experience.

Atlos

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 17:14:47 -0400

Atlos is a platform for open source visual investigations. It helps journalists, human rights organizations, and OSINT investigators collaborate at scale. Atlos is supported by National Geographic, the Brown Institute, and Microsoft.

Stanford University

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 02:41:51 +0000

From September 2020 to June 2024, I was an undergraduate at Stanford. I majored in Symbolic Systems with an individually designed concentration in Digital Safety, Security, and Society.

Synthetic Disinformation

Sun, 02 Jun 2019 22:55:34 +0000

In this multi-part research project, Dr. Sarah Kreps and I studied how synthetic (AI-generated) disinformation can deceive the public and masquerade as reliable, human-written news.

Floodgate Reactor

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 02:54:19 +0000

I was part of Floodgate’s Reactor program. With my good friend Rhythm, I co-created:

An AI meeting notes app called Paxo that we grew to $20k in ARR. We didn’t spend any money on advertising — all our growth was original. We sold the business.
A “semantic observability” tool called Watchpost to give businesses a way to monitor the quality of their generative AI model outputs.
An end-to-end encrypted location sharing app for family safety called Latitude.

Paxo

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 17:14:47 -0400

Paxo is a consumer app that records voice recordings — typically meetings — and turns them into organized, detailed notes.

Shynet

Sat, 09 May 2020 20:55:10 +0000

Shynet is a modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics tool that works without cookies or JS. It’s one of my most successful open source projects. Check out the source code and installation instructions on GitHub.

Recurse Center

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 02:54:19 +0000

I was a member of the Recurse Center’s Spring 1 2020 batch; like all Recursers, I never graduated.

Politics

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 03:44:30 +0000

Starting in the spring of 2019, I worked on the technology subgroup of a major U.S. presidential campaign (mostly working on matters of cyber policy). I worked with the team to draft policy positions, and wrote weekly cyber policy briefings for the candidate.

Speaking

Thu, 11 Jul 2019 04:48:29 +0000

Conferences

DEF CON 31: The Hackers, The Lawyers, and the Defense Fund
RightsCon 2023: Designing Safer Visual Investigations at Scale

Selected Guest Lectures

Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: Large-Scale Open Source Investigations with Atlos (2023)
American University: Investigating Far-Right ‘Alt’ Platforms (2023)
Stanford University: Large-Scale Open Source Investigations with Atlos (in “Online Open Source Investigations”, 2022)

Programming

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 04:48:29 +0000

I love computing; I enjoy building systems, as well as just programming for programming’s sake. (The Joy of Computing!)

News Catalyst

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 04:00:59 +0000

In the fall of 2019, I worked at News Catalyst, building digital tools to empower local news organizations. My work at News Catalyst was supported by the Lenfest Institute.

First Look Media

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 04:36:44 +0000

In the summer of 2018, I worked on the engineering and research teams of First Look Media, the parent company of The Intercept, primarily on authoring an IETF Internet Draft.

Open source development

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:31:00 +0000

Most of the software I write is open source. In maintaining and contributing to these projects, I’ve learned about effective community building, communication, and documentation.

More research

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 02:26:28 +0000

You can see an overview of my research on my Google Scholar page.

Platforms’ content moderation decisions play a large role in mediating online discourse, especially during elections. What content did platforms label as misleading in the run up to the 2020 election? And were platforms consistent in their labeling decisions? In this paper, we leverage a unique dataset to answer these questions.

a17t

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 21:49:53 +0000

a17t is my lightweight open-source atomic design toolkit. It emphasizes customization, modularity, and separation of concerns (to the extent that is practical).

Politiwatch

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 03:44:30 +0000

Politiwatch is a nonprofit I founded in high school that uses technology to promote political accountability and digital rights.

More projects

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 21:50:06 +0000

A selection of older projects:

WhyPrivacyMatters.org — a collaborative project to argue for privacy; translated into 16 languages with over 30 contributors
OpenAlerts — an open source breaking news distribution system for newsrooms (with News Catalyst)
Politiwatch Disinformation Archive — a searchable index of the official Twitter disinformation archives

Introducing the Music Section

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the new music section of my website! Here I’ll be sharing thoughts on music I’m enjoying, audio projects I’m working on, and occasional explorations into music technology and sound design.

Stanford is a platform

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 09:15:00 -0700

I love talking to incoming students at Stanford. When I do, I always emphasize that Stanford is a platform, not a destination. Sure, they have a magical time ahead. They’ll make amazing friends, and they’ll enjoy unbelievably good weather.

AI image generators threaten child safety investigations

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 12:05:00 -0700

I believe that generative AI, developed and deployed thoughtfully, has the opportunity to profoundly reshape the world for the better. Emphasis on developed and deployed thoughtfully.

When your classmates threaten you with felony charges

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 09:38:00 -0700

A few weeks ago, I was part of a talk at DEF CON 31 called The Hackers, The Lawyers, and the Defense Fund. I was asked to share my experience receiving a legal threat for good-faith security research from my classmates.

Copyright trolls, inspect element, and the online abuse ecosystem

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 11:52:00 -0500

When you think of a state-sponsored online influence operation, you might picture large sprawling networks of high-follower accounts spreading disinformation. To give one canonical example, Russia’s Internet Research Agency impersonated the Tennessee GOP on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election, amassing over 130,000 followers before being taken down.

“It's open source! We’ll let our customers fix it.”

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 18:15:00 +0000

In general, open source maintainers owe you nothing. Despite maintainers often being volunteers, some users feel entitled to maintainers’ time, submitting feature requests and expecting the maintainers to implement whatever they want. This is wrong. I repeat, open source maintainers owe you nothing.

Are you a robot?

Sun, 29 Aug 2021 09:00:00 -0500

Poor robots. All around the internet are little ‘CAPTCHA’ checkboxes designed to keep them out. That terrible tickmark—“I am not a robot”—has caused many a positronic tear. Well, it’s time someone thought about the robots. I created a dedicated website for robots and harnessed the power of probability to keep humans out.

Spot the error on the nutrition label...

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 18:05:00 +0000

I usually only write about my own mistakes, but here I’m going to be writing about a mistake I noticed an error on the nutrition label of Quaker Oatmeal Squares cereal. The error is extremely minor (at least as far as I can tell), but it made me think—this label has been printed and seen probably millions of times, and yet this error remains on the box to this day (as of mid-August 2020).

Letter

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every once in awhile, I’ll be so excited about something that I’ll want to share it with you, too. This might be a new project, something I’ve come across, or (rarely) a new post. I expect to send a letter roughly once a month or less; I certainly won’t be crowding up your inbox.