Welcome to USMA Athena
USMA Athena is a secure digital service managed by the United States Military Academy Library to make the work of USMA scholars freely available, while also ensuring these resources are organized to preserve the legacy of USMA scholarship. The mission of USMA Athena is to showcase the academic impact and intellectual capital that has become synonymous with the celebrated heritage of educational prowess attributed to the Long Gray Line. Scholarship submitted to USMA Athena benefits from added visibility and discoverability via Google Scholar in addition to the use of persistent URLs that will provide enduring access to the work over time.
Recent Submissions
Item type:Item, Privacy Under Pressure: Assessing Online Commercial Surveillance Countermeasures and Gaps(ECCWS, 2026-06-15)Ubiquitous technical surveillance is reshaping the modern information environment. Commercial web-tracking technologies have evolved into a pervasive technical surveillance infrastructure, enabling the large-scale collection of data from everyday activities as people participate in modern society. With sufficient analysis, this data can reveal sensitive information - posing risks to individuals, organizations, and national security. Several software packages exist to limit the exposure of personal information collected online. In recent years, laws and regulations, such as the GDPR and CCPA, have been implemented to help users protect their personal information, with varying degrees of success. This paper examines the recent scholarly literature on web tracking and commercial surveillance techniques. We then synthesize these studies to outline the methods that enable large-scale commercial surveillance on the Internet. Then, we analyze countermeasures designed to limit commercial data exposure, specifically assessing their effectiveness, technical constraints, and operational challenges. Our analysis reveals gaps in existing countermeasures and identifies opportunities for both technical and policy-based improvements to mitigate vulnerabilities introduced by commercially available information. These findings clarify the limitations of current web browser defenses and provide researchers and policymakers with directions on where further effort and investment are most needed.Item type:Item, Driving Artificial Intelligence(2025)You are an advisor to a self-driving vehicle research and manufacturing company. You received the letter below from the Chief of the Emergency Response System Division. Evaluate the options available, explore new options, select an option for your response, and provide your rationale.Item type:Item, The 72-hour ghost: AI vs the ticking clock(2025)The leak of officials’ private schedules and security codes suggests a massive internal data breach. Forensic analysts confirm that the message originated from a rotating sequence of burner accounts routed through Tor, and every email is signed by the same pseudonym: “The Ghost.”Item type:Item, Hacking the Vaccine(2025)You are a member of a team of staffers who work cybersecurity issues for the National Security Council. During the last meeting, the president complained loudly about China’s hacking of research organizations that are developing COVID-19 vaccines. He mentioned “the story in the news,” and you have been tasked to provide a briefing and policy options.Item type:Item, CrowdStrike Cyber-Case: Update to Global Outage(2026)On July 19, 2024, a massive IT outage took place due to the failure of a software update coming from CrowdStrike, one of the top global cybersecurity firms. The outage affected more than 8.5 million Windows devices and led to severe problems delivering services in domains ranging from airlines to hospitals.1 CrowdStrike fixed the issue in less than a week, but it revealed serious issues with the automated updates used by IT infrastructure.
Communities in USMA Athena
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