Archive for the ‘Anonymity’ Category
Burglars Like Facebook, Too
posted by Danielle Citron
Facebook offers much to law enforcement, perhaps more than many might think. Last week, a Pennsylvania man was arraigned for felony burglary, having allegedly broken into a woman’s home and stolen jewelry. The defendant seemingly played a big role in ensuring his capture: he checked his Facebook page during the burglary. The victim noticed that the defendant’s Facebook account appeared on her computer after the burglary. No joke. This takes harming oneself through social networking to a new level.
September 22, 2009 at 11:53 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Criminal Law, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Technology, Uncategorized, Weird
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Reservoirs of Patient Data: Next Generation’s Privacy Problem
posted by Danielle Citron
Patients of rare diseases find that drug companies have little interest in devoting limited R&D budgets to diseases of small populations. As a result, patients have begun to strike out on their own in the search of cures. As The New York Times explains, patients increasingly share their medical information (including details about their everday experiences living with a disease) online in the hopes that other similarly-situated patients will do the same. This would permit interested academic researchers to mine the data for observations about their diseases. Patients see online communities as offering new ways to transform medical research–especially into rare diseases that elude the current model of large-scale studies of widespread conditions.
Some experts are skeptical, asking how these sites will guarantee patient privacy. One imagines that these sites will respond to privacy concerns by employing anonymization practices. For instance, sites might delete personal identifiers like names and social security numbers and remove other potential identifiers, such as names of next of kin or student ID numbers. This ostensibly permits researchers to use the amassed data without concomitant privacy risks. But, as Paul Ohm’s important and engrossing new paper Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization argues, technology renders this privacy-protection option obsolete. Computing advances now permit clever adversaries to reidentify or deanonymize the people hidden in anonymized databases. This means that datasets that were meant to be kept apart are easily rejoined, allowing sensitive secrets to be revealed.
Patients may of course be willing to take that risk if their particpation in open-source research leads to cures of rare diseases. Yet patients also jeopardize their offsprings’ privacy: if medical information can be reidentified with ease and linked with other datasets, a patient’s children may get caught up in that web of re-identification. This may lead to genetic discrimination in the grown-up child’s life. Grown-up children may be willing to bear that risk–it is, however, worth considering this possibility when assessing privacy concerns related to such open-source research efforts.
September 1, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy (Medical), Technology, Uncategorized
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The Revenge of College Gossip Websites
posted by Daniel Solove
A while ago, the notorious college gossip website, Juicy Campus, bit the dust. But according to an article by Jeffrey Young in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“This is the new JuicyCampus,” says a note at Campus Gossip, which boasts campus-specific message boards for hundreds of colleges and encourages anonymous and racy barbs such as “These Fellas got herpes,” with a list of names attached. Going even further than its predecessor, there’s also a photo section where students can post embarrassing pictures and videos of others.
The site is planning a back-to-school marketing push, including a happy hour near Arizona State University where a rap artist named Sabotage will perform a song about the pleasures of campus gossip.
Another site, CollegeACB (the letters stand for Anonymous Confession Board), paid the defunct JuicyCampus $10,000 to redirect visitors from its Web address to CollegeACB.
For those who want a first-hand look at these sites, the Campus Gossip site is here and the CollegeACB site is here. I’m quoted in the article, as is co-blogger Danielle Citron:
Internet shaming creates an indelible blemish on a person’s identity,” wrote Daniel J. Solove, a professor of law at George Washington University, in his 2007 book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale University Press). “It’s similar to being forced to wear a digital scarlet letter or being branded or tattooed. People acquire permanent digital baggage. They are unable to escape their past, which is forever etched into Google’s memory.” . . . .
“I don’t see why it has to be that way,” the law professor told me in a recent interview. “Just like when you drive, it’s not a free-for-all,” he added, equating the current laws governing online forums to a road without traffic lights or stop signs. “It’s like if we looked at the roads and said, There’s just nothing to be done—let’s just abolish all rules of the road.” . . . .
Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, said she hoped that stamping out harassment on campus-gossip Web sites would be considered a matter of civil rights.
She makes the case in an article published in the Michigan Law Review this year called “Law’s Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment.” In it, she argues that law-enforcement officials fail to take seriously complaints about online anonymous comments, and that using “civil-rights remedies” may be the most effective way to pursue such acts.
“Women should not have to wait until cyberharassment fulminates into physical violence for law enforcement to address it,” she wrote. “A civil-rights agenda … would demonstrate that the Internet is not the lawless Wild West, just as court settlements and state legislation made clear that the home does not insulate abusing husbands from societal intervention.”
August 31, 2009 at 9:51 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Web 2.0
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Lori Drew Case Decided
posted by Daniel Solove
The Lori Drew case has finally been decided. Background about the case is here. In previous posts (here and here), I argued that the CFAA should be held to be unconstitutionally vague.
In an opinion released on August 28, Judge George Wu struck down, on unconstitutional vagueness grounds, the prosecution’s attempt to enforce violations of website terms of service as crimes under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA):
[I]f any conscious breach of a website’s terms of service is held to be sufficient by itself to constitute intentionally accessing a computer without authorization or in excess of authorization, the result will be that section 1030(a)(2)(C) becomes a law “that affords too much discretion to the police and too little notice to citizens who wish to use the [Internet].” City of Chicago [v. Morales], 527 U.S. [41] at 64 [(1999)].
Congratulations to Orin Kerr, who assisted in the defense, and who is cited numerous times throughout the court’s opinion.
August 29, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Web 2.0
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Cyber Gender Harassment: “Skanks of NYC”
posted by Danielle Citron
Dan, Kaimi, and Elizabeth have offered some terrific insights on the issues raised by the court’s unmasking of the “Skanks of NYC” blogger. Kaimi’s post “Cyber Civil Rights vs Privacy in the ‘Skanks in NYC’ case” in particular did a superb job capturing the issue as discrimination. I write here to follow up on issues related to the case that folks have discussed with me.
Some have asked whether this case warrants treatment as a cyber civil rights issue since it “is just a girl cat fight.” To be sure, women can deprive other women of their right to be free of unequal treatment on the basis of their gender. But the larger concern is, for me, convincing skeptics to see the blog attacks on Ms. Cohen as more than just an interpersonal disagreement between two women, something that tort law can handily address on its own, but rather as gender discrimination. Tort law would not reach the harm experienced by Ms. Cohen, women, and society due to the blog’s interference with her right to equal treatment. It would not address the stigma that Ms. Cohen experienced a a result of the blog’s message that she had worth only as a sex object. Much like sexual harassment in the workplace, the blog suggested that Ms. Cohen constitutes an object of sexual derision, not a person worthy of respect. Moreover, they interfered with Ms. Cohen’s right to work as an equal. According to Ms. Cohen, potential employers asked her about the blog, which quite possibly deterred them and others from hiring her. In a world filled with aspiring models, employers might chose to work with someone who comes with less baggage, even if they do not believe the postings a wit. And the blog postings harm women as a group and a society as a whole by entrenching gender hierarchy in cyberspace. Whether current law would support such a claim is certainly in dispute, but such a law could be crafted. Such a law would play an important expressive role–it would change the social meaning of such harassment of women.
Indeed, as privacy scholar Ian Kerr suggested, maybe the media’s attention to the case can be attributed to its leering interest in a “battle” between two beautiful women? Maybe coverage of the issue reflects a deeper misogyny: the story has attracted so much attention because it produces an image of women as female wrestlers of sorts, battling it out in their bikinis?
August 26, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Civil Rights, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Privacy, Uncategorized
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Can You Be Sued for Unmasking an Anonymous Blogger?
posted by Daniel Solove
A model named Liskula Cohen was being attacked on a blog called Skanks in NYC. The author of the Skanks blog was anonymous. Kashmir Hill reports:
Cohen started pursuing the defamation suit against the anonymous ‘Skanks’ blogger in January after discovering the site, on which the blogger called Cohen a skank, a ho, and an old hag, among other nasty things, and posted photos of her, taken from various websites. Since Cohen needed the identity of the blogger in order to file the lawsuit against her, a judge in Manhattan granted Cohen’s request to force Google to reveal the e-mail address and IP address of the alleged defamer.
Cohen has since dropped her $3 million lawsuit. The unmasked blogger — Rosemary Port — plans to sue Google for $15 million for breaching its fiduciary duty to defend her anonymity.
Over at CyberSLAPP, a website maintained by EFF (disclosure: I’m on EFF’s advisory board), ACLU, CDT, EPIC, and Public Citizen, they have posted documents from the case, including the court’s order to Google to unmask the author of Skanks.
CyberSLAPP seeks to combat frivolous lawsuits to reveal another’s identity:
CyberSLAPP cases typically involve a person who has posted anonymous criticisms of a corporation or public figure on the Internet. The target of the criticism then files a frivolous lawsuit just so they can issue a subpoena to the Web site or Internet Service Provider (ISP) involved, discover the identity of their anonymous critic, and intimidate or silence them.
The Skanks in NYC raises a lot of interesting issues. I’ll tackle a few in this post.
1.Was Cohen’s lawsuit frivolous? Cohen might have a decent defamation lawsuit, but she subsequently dropped it when she found out Cohen’s identity. This behavior indicates she was using the lawsuit only to unmask the blogger. I agree with CyberSLAPP that such a practice should be restricted.
August 25, 2009 at 7:04 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Tort Law, Web 2.0
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Surveillance Facebook-Style: It’s Your Party and You Can Cry If You Want To
posted by Danielle Citron
The U.K.’s Register reports that British police stormed a man’s birthday barbeque party because his invite to 15 Facebook friends advertised an “all night party.” Before the party could really begin, police showed up in four cars, a riot van, and a helicopter, ordering the birthday boy to shut the party down or face arrest. With an appropriate amount of humor, Andrew Poole, the birthday trouble-maker, explained: “What the police did was come in and stop 15 people eating hamburgers.” What would possess the Facebook Precinct to bother here? Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 grants police powers to remove individuals attending or preparing for a “rave,” defined as playing amplified music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”
This incident demonstrates the perils of a society that monitors and mines Facebook communications. The costs to liberty include blows to free expression and association. Brits will surely think twice about wall messages and “what I am doing now” missives that include talk of parties and other activities subject to misinterpretation. The costs to society: the misdirection of police from real threats to society and wasted resources spent breaking up a birthday bash (the helicopter time apparently cost 200 pounds and tack on the police efforts, including any investigation they conducted and time at the party, and gas for the four cars and van). So with Facebook surveillance the British may get less liberty and less security.
Commentators on the Register story noted their relief at living in the United States. They suggested that law enforcement and security officials would never be so foolish as to monitor Facebook traffic. Think again. The NSA’s Advanced Research Development Activity (ARDA) has funded research on the “Semantic Analytics on Social Networks: Experiences in Addressing the Problem of Conflict of Interest Detection,” which discusses how intelligence about people can be extracted from social networks. ARDA’s role is to spend NSA money on research that can “solve some of the most critical problems facing the U.S. intelligence community.” ARDA’s function is to make sense of the massive amount of data that the NSA collects.
Should Americans be worried about intelligence profiling a la Facebook? Many might think that the use of privacy settings on social networking sites would obviate the problem. First, studies suggest that most social networking site users use the default privacy settings, which are often the least privacy protecting and may reveal much of a user’s musings. Second, this assumption presumes that third party sites will not turn over social networking data, which they own, to the government, either for a pretty price or in the face of a subpoena or warrant. This assumption may be faulty. So what is all of the fuss? Automated intelligence profiling has obvious costs, such as the ones posed by the birthday party bust. It also has less apparent ones, such as mining misleading social networking data with other not-so reliable private and public database date and, poof, people end up on government watchlists.
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July 19, 2009 at 4:01 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security), Technology, Uncategorized
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Twitter Fraud
posted by Danielle Citron
Individuals increasingly use social networking tools to commit fraud. Philadelphia Eagles player Asante Samuel discovered his Twitter imposter after the Philadelphia Daily News attributed to him comments from his doppleganger’s Twitter feed. Keith Olbermann was a victim of Twitter impersonation as was Tony La Russa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. Temple professor Susan Jacobson predicts that much like the early days of the Internet when individuals bought the domain names of celebrities to sell it to those notables for a tidy profit, we will likely see variations of such mischief on social networking sites.
Aside from the celebrity context, we may see other misuses of Twitter feeds. Governments increasingly use Twitter to alert the public about car accidents, fires, crime reports, and public health emergencies. A tweet about a fabricated fire or car accident could cause dangerous traffic jams and needless panic. Someone could impersonate a police department, sending tweets about crimes never committed. This teaches us to be circumspect about all of those Twitter updates.
H/T to Jim Stanton for his blog posting, “Social Media Fraud On the Increase.”
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June 10, 2009 at 11:11 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Criminal Law, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Privacy (Law Enforcement), Technology, Uncategorized
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Peoples Dirt, Now Terrorizing High Schoolers Everywhere
posted by Danielle Citron
When Juicy Campus closed for business, many students, parents, and educators sighed with relief. We unfortunately had little to celebrate. As I noted then, Juicy Campus was but one player in a crowded line up of anonymous attack sites.
Yesterday’s Washington Post sadly underscored that point in its coverage of Peoples Dirt. The site has the dubious distinction of being one of the first to organize anonymous gossip by high schools. A review of its postings reveals that the site is a Juicy Campus for Juniors. And like its now-defunct older sibling, Peoples Dirt is filled with attacks on named individuals. As Brian Leiter has aptly described similar sites, it is a cyber cesspool of racist, sexist, and homophobic rants. Posters claim to have had sex with named female students. They disparage named girls’ body parts; they compile lists of the “ugliest middle school” girls. They discuss students’ sexuality in threatening ways. A posting under a male student’s name: “we know your g@y…just come out of the closet…and you should choke on a dick and die.”
Sadly, the era of the anonymous gossip site is far from over.
May 18, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming)
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CCR Symposium: Risk Perception and Online Speech
posted by Dave Hoffman
I want to join the other participants in this symposium in congratulating Danielle for putting together such a terrific article. As James G. writes, Danielle frames a compelling case for thinking about online harassment as a civil rights problem, an approach both novel and bracing.
Back in March, Danielle put up a post on Trivializing Women’s Harms: The Story of Cyber Gender Harassment. That post attracted commentators, and links, who vigorously disputed both the seriousness of the risk posed by online speech and the (lightness) of the burden that she suggested be placed on anonymous speech. Were we not controlling the comment threads on these posts relatively carefully, we’d see a similar level of skepticism, expressed in vivid, personal, terms. But why would this be? Why aren’t the risks that the online “speech” pose as obvious to our commentators as they are to Daneille and others on this blog?
The reason isn’t because partisans (like the ACLU, whose inconsistency is remarked by Ann Bartow), or free speech advocates, are deliberately conforming their views of risk to their personal interests or ideological positions. Rather, as cultural cognition theory predicts, “individuals are disposed selectively to accept or dismiss risk claims in a manner that expresses their cultural values.” Persons of hierarchical and individualistic orientations will worry more about being rendered defenseless by gun control; egalitarians and communitarians will worry about the legacy of patriarchy and racism associated with guns and thus discount those risks. Similarly hierarchs will be worried about the risks of disorder following flight from the police; egalitarians will be more concerned about the risks of police oppression. And so on.
Applying the group-grid theory to the project of cyber risks suggests that individualists , who value markets and private ordering, might be disposed to discount the risks of online “mobs”, unless those mobs are directed at values of concern, like the right to be anonymous and free from regulation. By contrast, communitarians believe that individuals will interact with one another frequently, depend on one another, and that this mutual inter-dependence is a condition to be celebrated and supported. Thus, people of different cultural views will have distinct views of the risks of conduct & the benefits of regulation, and those views will (significantly) be less likely that you might think to respond to new sets of “facts”. Perversely, arguing from facts my accent, not ameliorate, dissension between individuals holding different values.
What, then, is to be done to convince the individualists that their values aren’t under assault and that the risks of online mobs are severe enough to warrant some form of regulation? Danielle suggests that framing this as a civil rights problem would serve a valuable “normative and expressive role.” The danger, I think, is that many will respond, as does Orin Kerr here, by suggesting that there are competing norms and expressed values in play. It’s a serious problem, and I don’t have the answers. But I do think that being more generous & attentive to those holding different values is an important part of coming to consensus, and thus I’m really pleased with the respect and collegiality demonstrated in this symposium so far.
April 15, 2009 at 11:36 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Behavioral Law and Economics, Conferences, Cyber Civil Rights
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CCR Symposium: The Right to Remain Anonymous Matters
posted by Michael Froomkin
Orin Kerr says he was brought in to be a mild dissenter. I fear I may have been set up to be the pig at the garden party.
So let me start by saying that Danielle Citron’s Cyber Civil Rights is a wonderful paper. It is right about many things, although I’d be prepared to wonder whether the expression-action distinction might not reflect something true, real, and valuable, or whether the current balance between libel and the ‘wild west’ of unregulated speech is really so bad. But never mind all that: for present purposes let’s stipulate that Cyber Civil Rights is right about all its facts — including (as I indeed have no doubt she is right) about the terrible harms being wreaked online by evil people at the expense of innocent victims who are (wildly) disproportionately female and minorities. And let’s further stipulate that the article is right about its novel and exciting statutory arguments concerning how existing civil rights law might be used to deal with that – stuff I had fun thinking about and enjoyed teaching too.
Nevertheless, I have deep, deep problems with the paper’s proposed remedy — because there’s something critical that the paper leaves out.
April 14, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Constitutional Law, Cyber Civil Rights
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Online Symposium: Citron’s Cyber Civil Rights
posted by Frank Pasquale
From tomorrow through Thursday, Concurring Opinions will be hosting a number of scholars invited to discuss Danielle Citron’s work Cyber Civil Rights. Responding to controversies over online attacks, Citron argues the following:
Social networking sites and blogs have increasingly become breeding grounds for anonymous online groups that attack women, people of color, and members of other traditionally disadvantaged groups. These destructive groups target individuals with defamation, threats of violence, and technology-based attacks that silence victims and concomitantly destroy their privacy. Victims go offline or assume pseudonyms to prevent future attacks, impoverishing online dialogue and depriving victims of the social and economic opportunities associated with a vibrant online presence. Attackers manipulate search engines to reproduce their lies and threats for employers and clients to see, creating digital “scarlet letters” that ruin reputations. . . .
Web 2.0 technologies accelerate mob behavior. With little reason to expect self-correction of this intimidation of vulnerable individuals, the law must respond. General criminal statutes and tort law proscribe much of the mobs’ destructive behavior, but the harm they inflict also ought to be understood and addressed as civil rights violations. Civil rights suits reach the societal harm that would otherwise go unaddressed and would play a crucial expressive role. Acting against these attacks does not offend First Amendment principles when they consist of defamation, true threats, intentional infliction of emotional distress, technological sabotage, and bias-motivated abuse aimed to interfere with a victim’s employment opportunities. To the contrary, it helps preserve vibrant online dialogue and promote a culture of political, social, and economic equality.
As I’ve noted before, I think this piece breaks new ground in applying venerable laws to the online environment. In this cyber-symposium, we propose to discuss the following issues:
What can the law do to respond to these threats?
How we deter harassment while promoting legitimate speech?
How do we balance the privacy rights of speakers and those they speak about in the new communicative landscape created by sites like AutoAdmit, Juicy Campus, Facebook, and anonymous message boards?
A list of scholars invited to discuss these issues appears below:
April 13, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Feminism and Gender, Google & Search Engines, Law and Inequality, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Technology
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Lessons from the Identity Trail
posted by Daniel Solove
There’s a terrific new book of essays about privacy out from Oxford University Press — LESSONS FROM THE IDENTITY TRAIL: ANONYMITY, PRIVACY AND IDENTITY IN A NETWORKED SOCIETY (Oxford University Press 2009). It’s edited by Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves, and Carole Lucock. The essays are fascinating and are written by a number of very prominent privacy scholars. Highly recommended!
The book is available free for download under a Creative Commons license. One third of the essays are now posted online. The rest will become available in two more stages — on April 22th and May 6th. This is the first book to be published by Oxford University Press under a Creative Commons license.
The book is available on Amazon.com or on our special Concurring Opinions Oxford University Press promo page for 20% off.
Here’s the table of contents:
April 8, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (ID Theft), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical)
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Trivializing Women’s Harms: The Story of Cyber Gender Harassment
posted by Danielle Citron
On March 3, 2009, National Public Radio host Tom Ashbrook hosted a conversation about cyber harassment with David Margolick, Marc Randazza, Anthony Ciolli, and myself. Our discussion focused on the attacks on female law students at AutoAdmit in 2007. Here is a little background: anonymous individuals posted hundreds of sexually explicit, threatening, economically-harming, and allegedly defamatory statements about named female students. For instance, “[female student's name] is a dumbass slut with huge fake t****s who I want to rape in the ass”; “I will force myself on her and sodomize her repeatedly”; “She deserves to be raped so that her little fantasy world can be shattered by real life.” Posters suggested that they had access to the named women, noting what they wore at the law school gym, providing updates on their whereabouts, and encouraging others to take pictures of the named women and post them on the site. Posters accused named women of having sexually transmitted diseases (e.g., “[Named female student] is a slut but don’t f***k her she has herpes”). They sent emails to former and prospective employers urging the law firms not to hire named women due to their low character. A poster told the community there that he sent an email to a named student’s faculty members with embarassing information about her. Posters hailed the sender as a hero who should be awarded a Congressional medal. Others engaged in a google bombing campaign to ensure the prominence of the offensive threads in searches of the women’s names: “We’re not going to let that bitch have her own blog be the first result from googling her name!”
During the program, former New York Times At the Bar columnist and current editor at Portfolio magazine David Margolick characterized the AutoAdmit attacks as mostly “juvenile, immature, and obnoxious, but that is all they are.” He called them “frivolous frat boy rants.” Margolick said that because the female law students who graduated from the most prestigious law school in the country now have good jobs, they suffered no harm. Mark Randazza agreed with this characterization of the harassment: “these are digital natives; it is their juvenile shtick.”
As my article “Law’s Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment” (forthcoming Michigan Law Review) argues in great detail, far too many people like Margolick and Randazza trivialize the serious harms that women uniquely suffer as a result of such cyber harassment in much the same way that society downplayed or ignored workplace sexual harassment until 1970s. In the face of threats of sexual violence, women not only feel afraid, but also chilled to act on their own desires. Women withdraw from online discussion groups, shut down their blogs, and alter their physical activities to avoid offline harassment connected to the online harassment. For instance, AutoAdmit victims stopped going to the gym to ensure that the anonymous posters could not take a picture of her and post it online. The cyber harassment also harms women’s dignity and sense of equal worth. Online assaults objectify women by reducing them to their body parts. Harassers further humiliate women by reducing them to diseased body parts. This treats women as moral subordinates and undermines their self-respect just as workplace sexual harassment makes women feel like sex objects, not competent workers. Women suffer a performative harm: they may assume male pseudonyms online to avoid cyber harassment. And cyber harassment inflicts distinct harms to women’s emotional and physical well-being. Women fear that online threats of sexual violence will be realized: anonymous threats are all the more frightening as they are shorn of any cues that might alleviate that fear.
March 8, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Technology, Web 2.0
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Open Source Censorship
posted by Danielle Citron
In nations with strong Internet censorship policies, the government typically runs the effort to block unwanted Web content. China, for instance, uses its vast resources, both technological and human, to maintain its Great Firewall. But Saudi Arabia has followed a different path to acheive similar results. As Business Week reports, Saudi Arabia claims to rely on its citizens to recommend sites that should be blocked. The government reportedly receives roughly 1,200 messages a day, typically students and religious leaders, flagging offensive sites. Its Communications & Information Technology Commission (CITC) only has 25 people working on censorship issues although it does employ software to block clear-cut violations of its communications policy, such as web sites for pornography and gambling. CITC uses software from San Jose-based Secure Computing that offers a menu of 90 categories of sites to block.
Groups that monitor press freedom around the world suggest that Saudi censorship policies are “among the most restrictive in the world” in targeting criticism of the royal family and religion. Human rights group Reporters Without Borders has extensive coverage on Saudi Arabia’s censorship policies. For instance, all discussions of women’s rights are blocked. And, as Business Week notes, local blogger Fouad al Farhan was jailed early this year for advocating political reforms. While Farhan wrote under his own name, most of the country’s 2,000 bloggers write anonymously.
The CITC, however, suggests that its censorship has the imprimatur of its citizens who participate in the government’s efforts to ban pornography and unpopular ideas. It explains that only 40% of its citizens are concerned about its censorship efforts. Questions remain as to whether citizen participation in the work of CITC is, in fact, as wide-spread as the government suggests and whether our free speech values truly do have little resonance there.
November 16, 2008 at 11:03 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Cyberlaw, First Amendment
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The Bionic Eye
posted by Danielle Citron
According to Government Technology, engineers at the University of Washington have developed contact lenses with integrated circuitry. Although the lenses have only been tested on animals, researchers are working on having electronic lenses overlay a display over a person’s visual field without impairing sight. Researchers hope that the lenses, once completed, will allow users to zoom in on distant objects and see useful facts. Future applications might allow drivers and pilots to see their direction and speed projected across their view or to surf the Web without a monitor. The circuit components would be powered by integrated solar cells and a wireless radio-frequency receiver.
Electronic contacts lenses gives rise to interesting questions about their potential use. Could a zoom function and connection to the Net allow drivers to record and transmit the license plates of reckless drivers to insurance companies and local police? Lior Strahilevitz’s superb article “‘How’s My Driving’ for Everyone (and Everything?)” contemplated the use of technologies to report driver misconduct to assist the police in combating dangerous driving, reduce information assymetries in the insurance market, improve the tort system, and alleviate driver frustration over the current feeling of helplessness in the face of reckless driving. As the article demonstrates, the virtual anonymity of drivers magnifies dangerous behavior on the road because drivers do not suffer social disapproval for poor driving and have a profound sense that they will never get caught. These lenses could fundamentally alter that sense of anonymity on the road and could deter antisocial behavior. The bionic eye could play an important role in altering behavior and may raise privacy concerns worth discussing.
November 10, 2008 at 10:23 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Privacy
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Judge Kozinski: The First Amendment Is Dead
posted by Dave Hoffman
Judge Alex Kozinski came to Temple this afternoon and delivered the Arlin Adams lecture, on “The Late, Great First Amendment.” Typically provocative, Kozinski argued that individuals’ inability to bring effective lawsuits for internet speech renders obsolete existing First Amendment doctrine. In his view, traditional First Amendment doctrine had promoted an informed democratic discourse by maintaining a threat – though remote – of the possibility of recovery for libel, defamation, copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and spreading protected national secrets. By contrast, given the Streisand effect and Wikileaks’ portability and thus immunity, the modern world provides no effective remedies for unprotected speech.
Without liability pressure disciplining the speaking market, Kozinski sketched out a distopian lemons market for speech: untrusted intermediaries, unreported international and national news, and a cacophony of speakers saying little of interest.
I’m running off to class now, so I don’t have time for an extended analysis, but it strikes me that Kozinski’s eulogy for the First Amendment was premature for at least three reasons: (1) the kind of mass media he mourned – protected by a prior restraint doctrine and fattened by classified ads – is the exception and not the norm in our tradition, so any conclusions relying on the Amendment’s relationship to the particular character of the news media seem overdrawn; (2) as my colleague David Post pointed out, there are strong economic reasons for online intermediaries to establish transparent reputations for honesty – that is, technical warranties ought to solve the lemons problem; (3) speech may be governed by law even if plaintiffs can’t effectively enforce available legal rules. Think international law. Or, closer to home, think about the duty of care in Delaware. No one really believes that corporate actors are acting according to their whim and fancy despite facing no remedy for their negligence. If the First Amendment has no downside teeth, it can still create sticky norms.
As I said, a great speech. It featured references to David Lat & the Volokh Conspiracy, among others. But not CoOp. Maybe we ought to be running a hotties contest.
More later (maybe.)
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October 20, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Posted in: Anonymity,
OK
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