Archive for the ‘Architecture’ Category

The Right to the Internet

posted by Danielle Citron

According to a poll sponsored by the BBC World Service, four in five adults in more than 26 countries believe that Internet access is a fundamental right.  The poll asked more than 27,000 adults about their attitudes towards the Internet and found that 87 percent of regular Internet users agree that access should be a “fundamental right of all people.”  More than 71 percent of non-Internet users felt that they should have the right to access the global network.

Crucial to our access to the Internet is our continued adherence to the end-to-end principle.  As legal scholar and computer scientist Barbara van Schewick explained in her Opening Statement at the FCC’s Workshop on Innovation, Investment, and the Open Internet, the “network was designed to be as general as possible in order to support a wide variety of applications with different needs.  So when a new application comes along, the network doesn’t have to be changed to allow the application to run.  All the innovator has to do is write the program that runs on a computer attached to the Internet.”  As van Schewick notes, the low cost of developing new applications has enabled the creation of eBay and Skype, even though many questioned those applications’ ability to succeed in the marketplace (who would buy goods through online auctions?) or their plausibility (network engineers didn’t initially think internet telephony was possible).

Now, however, sophisticated technology is available that “enables network providers to identify the applications and content on their network and control their execution.”    According to van Schewick, the “original Internet was application-blind,” but “today’s Internet is not.”  This matters to access and innovation.  Although a programmer may have a great idea for a video platform that will revolutionize the way people watch television, cable providers could squash it.  They could block the inventor’s application or slow it down.  Why would they do that?  As van Schewick explains, maybe the application competes with theirs, maybe they want a share of the inventor’s profits, maybe they don’t like the content, or maybe the application is slowed down to manage bandwidth.  Whatever the reason, the network provider can ensure the failure of the inventor’s project, chasing away potential investors and other inventors.  In the end, this risks the diversity of innovation and its concomitant societal benefits.  If network providers “pick winners and losers on the Internet, if they decide how users can use the network, users may end up with applications that they would not have chosen, and may be forced to use the Internet in a way that does not create the value it could.”

In short, our failure to commit to network neutrality, to permit discrimination among applications, has a deep impact on what people now believe is their fundamental right.  van Schewick closed her Open Statement with a telling story.  She asked if the audience had tried to explained to their partners’ grandparents why they should get the Internet.  She explained that she had and noted that she didn’t say: “Grandma, you have to get the Internet?  It’s cool!  It lets you send data packets back and forth.”  “No, I said: ‘If you get the Internet, you can call us and see your grandchildren on the screen.  And if we have new pictures, you’ll be able to see them immediately after we send them.  And you can read about everything you can possibly imagine’ . . . “  Thus, by “protecting the factors that have fostered application innovation in the past, we can make sure that the Internet will be even more useful and valuable in the future.”

  March 8, 2010 at 8:53 am   Posted in: Architecture, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Technology   Print This Post   3 Comments

Innovative Architectures of Privacy

posted by Danielle Citron

As Daniel J. Weitzner recently noted to the New York Times, our current notice-and-choice model of privacy may soon be dead and good riddance.  Since the 1990s, we have relied upon websites’ privacy policies to inform individuals about whether their information would be collected, used, and shared.  Consumers usually don’t read these policies and, if they did, they likely would not understand them.  This leaves us with with much room to do better.

In “Redrawing the Route to Online Privacy,” the New York Times discusses how law and technology might get help us out of this mess.  The article highlighted several intriguing technical innovations.  A group at Carnegie Mellon University has designed software that will nudge consumers about the privacy implications of sharing certain information.  As CMU’s  Lorrie Faith Cranor explains, social network site users often share their birth dates, hoping to receive online greetings from friends yet doing so runs the risk of marketing profiling, identification, and identity theft.  Software could inform consumers of these risks before they share their birth dates.  M. Ryan Calo, a fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society who has done exciting work on the privacy implications of robots, is exploring voice and animation technology emulating humans that would provide “visceral notice.”  Before someone puts information in a personal health record like GoogleHealth, a virtual nurse could explain the privacy implications of sharing the information.  Calo explains that people naturally react more strongly, in a more visceral way, to anthropomorphic cues.  The think tank Future of Privacy led by Jules Polonetsky and Chris Wolff is testing the effectiveness of using new icons and key phrases to provide web surfers with more transparency and choice about behavioral advertising practices.  Princeton’s Ed Felten (whose important computer science research has rightly preoccupied government and industry) is working on re-engineering the Web browser for greater privacy.  Felten would alter the software’s design so that information about on-screen viewing sessions is kept separate and not routinely passed along so a person’s browsing behavior can be tracked.

As these efforts make clear, code is crucial to the protection of consumer privacy.  To what extent, if at all, should we invoke law to regulate websites’ information practices?  Congress and the Federal Trade Commission is mulling rules that would limit a site’s use of information collected online.  As the New York Times notes, government might ban the use of recorded trails of a person’s web-browsing in employment or health insurance decisions.  It would be worth considering limits on data collection and retention practices too.  Law could require the deletion of certain information after a certain time, in the manner suggested by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s work.  All worth pondering.

  March 2, 2010 at 10:21 am   Posted in: Architecture, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   3 Comments

Boyden on Google Buzz and COPPA

posted by Danielle Citron

Guest blogger Professor Bruce Boyden has terrific insights on all things technology and law and so I invited him to comment on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and its impact on the Google Buzz phenomenon.  So here is Professor Boyden:

Thanks, Danielle, for inviting me to expand on my comment yesterday on your post on the Google Buzz story. Google Buzz has been obviously been all over the news lately, in part for various complaints about Google’s privacy practices. Those complaints have focused on the way in which Buzz, enrollment in which was automatic for Gmail users, initially defaulted to effectively sharing users’ email contacts with the public. EPIC has filed a complaint with the FTC arguing that this combination of automatic enrollment and “opt-out” of information-sharing was an unfair or deceptive trade practice in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act.

But that’s not what caught my attention in Danielle’s post. What really set off alarm bells in my head was Danielle’s recounting how her children and their friends, all under the age of 13, suddenly had their Gmail accounts turned into Google Buzz accounts,  and then proceeded to upload all sorts of information about themselves using the service. That raises the prospect that Google Buzz, by collecting such information without getting the appropriate parental consent, violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. I haven’t seen any discussion of this issue anywhere else.

COPPA is one of the few privacy statutes with real bite: it has strict rules that require substantial effort to follow, and the FTC has shown itself to be a vigorous enforcer. Indeed, the FTC has gone after two social networking sites for COPPA violations recently, and in one case imposed a fine of $1 million. So is Google violating COPPA? The answer is unclear but there’s definitely risk for Google here.

COPPA regulates the online collection of information from children under the age of 13. It applies to two classes of websites: those that have “actual knowledge” that they are collecting information from children, and those that are “directed to children.” If a website in either category is going to collect personally identifiable information (PII) from children, it first has to get “verifiable consent” from a parent. The FTC uses a “sliding scale” to determine what sort of verifiable parental consent is required; for information that is going to be publicly disclosed, as here, the FTC’s COPPA regulations require something like a mail-in form or a credit card. Read the rest of this post »

  February 17, 2010 at 9:34 am   Posted in: Architecture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   One Comment

BRIGHT IDEAS: Helen Nissenbaum’s Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life

posted by Danielle Citron

I’d like to second Dan’s enthusiasm for Helen Nissenbaum’s newest book, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford University Press 2009).  Privacy in Context is engrossing and important, and, lucky for us, I had a chance to interview Professor Nissenbaum about the book, her scholarship, and her thoughts on the future of privacy.  First, let me tell you a bit about Professor Nissenbaum.  Then, I will reproduce our interview below.

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Senior Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute.  Her areas of expertise span social, ethical, and political implications of information technology and digital media. Nissenbaum has written extensively in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science and has written and edited four books (including the book we highlight today).  She has also authored several important studies of values embodied in computer system design, including search engines, digital games, and facial recognition technology.

DC:  Why did you write this book?

HN:  I had published a series of articles on how privacy, conceptually and in practice, had been challenged by IT and digital media. Although, initially, these had been mainly critical in tone, for example, demonstrating how “privacy in public” exposed glaring weaknesses not only in predominant understandings of privacy but in approaches law and regulation, as well, they ultimately yielded the substantive idea of privacy as a claim to appropriate flows of personal information within distinctive social contexts, modeling this idea in terms of contextual integrity and — what I call in the book — “context-relative informational norms.” IT systems and digital media are often felt as privacy threats because they are disruptive of entrenched flows, they violate norms.

With these articles in far-flung journals, I realized it would be hard, if not impossible, for anyone to pull the whole argument together, to recognize the problems in certain other approaches and how contextual integrity addressed some of these. A book would consolidate these works into a coherent whole in what I imagined it would be the work of a mere few months — an extravagant miscalculation, of course.

While collaborating with colleagues from the PORTIA project (Adam Barth, Anupam Datta, and John Mitchell) to develop a formal expression of contextual integrity (in linear temporal logic), I came to realize that it needed significant sharpening. Further, it became increasingly clear that the theory needed a far more robust and fleshed out prescriptive (or normative) dimension, which I had only briefly sketched in the Washington Law Review article. This component would be absolutely essential to the success of contextual integrity as a whole, if the theory was to have moral “teeth.” And, of course, the longer I worked the larger the field became, more cases with which to reckon, more outstanding work to take into consideration. Mere months became a couple years.

DC:  What for you are the most pressing concerns that the book addresses.

HN:  Among the most pressing for me were:

First, to demonstrate that the private-public distinction, as useful as it may be in other areas of political and legal philosophy, is a terrible dead-end for conceptualizing a right to privacy and for formulating policy. In my view, far too much time has been wasted deciding whether this or that piece of information is private or public, whether this or that place is private or public, when, in fact, what ultimately we care about is what constraints ought to be imposed on the flows of this or that information in this or that place. We could make much more rapid progress addressing urgent privacy questions if we addressed the latter questions head-on instead of tying ourselves in knots over the former.

Second, to challenge the definition of privacy as control over information about oneself, which dominates policy realms, even if not to that extent in academia. The trouble with this definition is that it immediately places privacy at odds with other values, conceived as more pro-social. If the right to privacy is the right to control then of course it must be moderated, traded-off, compromised for the general good!  Moreover, it not even clear that control offers the best protection to the subject. Imagine, for example, if all that stood between individuals and access to their complete health records was subject consent and place these individual in a situation where a job, or mortgage, the chance to win the lottery, … hung in the balance. Fortunately, U.S. law recognizes that we need substantive constraints on information flow in certain areas – contexts – of life and though critics have pointed out many weaknesses in the letter of these laws, I believe the approach is dead right. Read the rest of this post »

  January 18, 2010 at 11:04 am   Posted in: Architecture, Articles and Books, Bright Ideas, Privacy, Technology   Print This Post   3 Comments

Mikey Doesn’t Like It: Watchlists Are Not For Kids

posted by Danielle Citron

Thankfully, our blog has Jeff Kahn, an expert on national security, guest blogging with us this month to teach us about the history and development of airline screening.  Picking up on Jeff’s insights, I’d like to follow up on stories about eight-year old Michael Hicks whose travels have been disrupted with frequent pat downs and questioning.  Why?  Michael’s name matches that of a person on the TSA selectee list.  As my previous posts, see here and here, and Technological Due Process article explored, the TSA uses crude matching algorithms by design.  The gamble for higher false positives is worth the pay off of nabbing a person bent on destruction.  This means that kids like Mikey and many others, even the late Senator Ted Kennedy for a time, face delays, intrusive questioning, and other inconveniences when they travel.

So how has the TSA responded to this recent flap about Mikey?  Blogger Bob on The TSA Blog explains:  “It’s inevitable that every several months or so, some cute kid gets their mug posted on a major news publication with a headline reading something like: “Does this look like a terrorist to you?” Anything involving kids or cats gets tons of mileage and everybody starts tweeting and retweeting that there’s an 8 year old on the no fly list.  There are no children on the No Fly or Selectee lists.  What happens is the child’s name is a match or similar match to an actual individual on the No Fly or Selectee Watch List.”  Now, Blogger Bob’s explanation is indeed spot on, but it seems callous and perhaps counter-productive if the TSA wants to tackle its PR problem with the public.  It seems dismissive to say that we only get up in arms when someone’s child gets ensnared in a screening mess.  While talking about Mikey may be a useful tool for newspapers to pique the public’s interest, so did the story about the late Senator Ted Kennedy and the many others, including airline pilots, who have difficulty traveling due to the TSA’s currently inefficient redress process.

Mikey’s mom, Najlah Hicks, commented on Blogger Bob’s post with this missive: “Instead of reaching out to our family, you chose to belittle the process by stating that ‘Anything involving kids or cats gets tons of mileage and everybody starts tweeting and retweeting that there’s an 8 year old on the no fly list.’  . . . It would have been far more helpful had he reached out to our family and help us formulate a solution than belittle the effort.  I am insulted and appalled that a representative from the TSA would chose to make such a juvenile and insulting statement.  You could have easily left the above quote off and just shared the Redress process with everyone.  It has been made quite clear to our family from both Continental and US Airlines that our son is clearly on a TSA list and they have absolutely no power in which to remove him.  If you think it’s far more helpful to belittle the process rather than just giving people the information they need, then I think the TSA has far more serious issues than any of us imagine.  I look forward to getting our son off a list he’s supposedly not on.”  Now, Blogger Bob assures the public that problems like Mikey’s will disappear once the Secure Flight program becomes operational.  We shall see.  Until then, while tricks may be for kids, watch lists are not.

  January 17, 2010 at 9:26 am   Posted in: Architecture, Current Events, Privacy, Privacy (National Security)   Print This Post   6 Comments

When Joining Forces Spells Trouble: Proposed Merger of E-Voting Companies

posted by Danielle Citron

Last month, Diebold announced that ES&S would purchase its e-voting business for $5 million plus some outstanding revenue.  Diebold’s shareholders no doubt rejoiced: while the company’s ATM machines have a strong reputation, its e-voting machines brought the company only grief.  Diebold even changed its e-voting unit’s name to Premier to protect the company’s otherwise strong brand name.

This merger, however, is bad news for voters.  It would entrust 3/4s of e-voting machines into the hands of a company whose machines rival Diebold’s for inaccuracy and insecurity.  Consider this recent example.  In 2008, ES&S machines allocated votes cast in one race to a different race that was not even on the ballot.  As a result, the wrong candidate won a state House nomination race.  Given the consolidation of the e-voting market, we can have little hope that future machines will be more secure.  Ed Felten explains that  “[t]he odds of one major e-voting company breaking from the pack and embracing up-to-date security engineering are now even slimmer than before.”  Because breaking into the e-voting business is expensive due to high accreditation costs, ES&S may face limp competition in bids for upcoming contracts.  Voting administrators thus may be unable to obtain important terms crucial to transparency and accountability, such as the placement of source code in escrow.

Although voters should lament this development, all isn’t lost.  As Joe Hall notes,  California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has provided wise advice to the Election Assistance Commission with regard to the integrity of e-voting systems.  Bowen urges that the EAC require greater disclosure of vulnerabilities, the adoption of procedures that jurisdictions can follow to collect and report data about incidents they experience with their voting systems, and the systematic collection of data from election officials about how voting systems perform during general elections.  This recalls the important work of Heather Gerken in her book The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System is Failing and How to Fix It.  The EAC would be wise to adopt these proposals, especially in light of the upcoming merger.

  October 24, 2009 at 2:17 pm   Posted in: Administrative Law, Architecture, Current Events, Technology, Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Fire — Good or Bad?

posted by Jon Siegel

Today is the 175th anniversary of the Great Fire of 1834, which destroyed most of the British Parliament buildings. A vivid audio description, by the Parliament’s current Clerk of the Records, can be found here. 

The hazardous state of the Parliament buildings, which were made of plaster-covered timber, was noted in the eighteenth century.  In 1789, a report signed by fourteen architechts complained of the danger of great damage in case of fire.  But few precautions were taken.

In October, 1834, the Clerk of the Works had to dispose of two cartloads of wooden “tally sticks” — remnants of an obsolete accounting system used by the Exchequer, a government finance department.  On October 16, 1834, the Clerk had a couple of workmen burn the tally sticks in furnaces that were part of the heating system of the House of Lords.  About 4 pm that afternoon, the deputy Housekeeper, Mrs. Wright, was conducting some visitors through the  Lords chamber, and the visitors noticed that the floor was hot and had smoke seeping through it so thickly that they couldn’t see their hands in front of them.  But she did nothing. 

By 6 pm, the House of Lords was on fire.  Through the night, the fire spread to the House of Commons chamber, the Commons Library, and other Parliament buildings.  Heroic firefighting action by fireman, soldiers, and private citizens saved Westminster Hall.

Obviously the fire was a terrible, devastating event.  But it did have consequences that some might regard as beneficial.  Even as the fire occurred, Augustus Charles Pugin, an architecht, rejoiced that later additions to the Parliament buildings, which he regarded as ruining the original medieval structure,  were finally gone.

And there is something else too.  I became familiar with the 1834 fire when researching my forthcoming article, Law and Longitude.  The article is a legal analysis of the controversy occasioned by the Longitude Act of 1714, which established a public prize for the discovery of a method of finding longitude at sea.  (If you’ve read Dava Sobel’s delightful book, Longitude, you know all about it.)

Much of the controversy concerned the proper interpretation of the Longitude Act, and, in accordance with modern interpretive practices, I wanted to research the Act’s legislative history.  But I couldn’t!  The history was destroyed in the fire, except for such small portions as were preserved in the official Journals of the House of Commons.

Today there is, of course, a lively controversy about the use of legislative history in statutory interpretation.  But one thing is certain:  courts couldn’t use legislative history if the history were destroyed.  Then we would be compelled to live in the textualists’ ideal world, in which we could only look at the text of the statute and try to determine what it means.

If you had the choice, would you put all legislative history to the fire?

  October 16, 2009 at 6:28 am  Tags: statutory interpretation  Posted in: Architecture, History of Law   Print This Post   4 Comments

Making the Internet Safer, the NSA Way

posted by Danielle Citron

Securing our networked environment is both crucial and difficult.  Six months ago, President Obama declared his Administration’s commitment to protect cyberspace from sabotage of all stripes.  For the President, the rise of online theft, electronic espionage, and military-related cyber assaults necessitated the appointment of a cyber czar to protect our cyber “national assets.”  The President has tried to fill that spot: Shane Harris of National Journal explains that “more candidates had declined the job than were still in the running for it.”  And despite our failed efforts at CoOp to recruit Orin Kerr for the job, the cyber czar position remains empty.

This state of affairs may be due to the difficult nature of the task at hand.  Former NSA head General Michael Hayden recently said: “There is no regime for us to work within to respond to cyberattack.  We are in a place where technology has long outstripped policy–let alone law–in term of what’s available.  We are going to have to rely on heroism instead of a plan.”  If Hayden has it right, it is no wonder that no one wants the job.

Nonetheless, the Administration may have already charted its path, one that entrusts the National Security Agency with protecting cyberspace.  According to the National Journal, Lt. General Keith B. Alexander, the NSA’s director, has been “setting up the central nervous system in the government’s campaign to defend cyberspace.”  The NSA will now, unlike the past, help oversee the networks of civilian government and privately-owned, criticial infrastructure (dams, railroads, hospitals, banks, food industry, hotels, telecommunications, postal, shipping, retail, transportation, and well everything else).  This is true even though DHS is charged with defending civilian networks and coordinating private sector protection.  Homeland Security Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that NSA will provide DHS “technical assistance” on this issue.  In short, DHS will rely on the NSA for the tools, expertise, and resources to protect cyberspace.

So the NSA apparently will be overseeing and securing private networks, the same NSA that engaged in wholesale warrantless surveillance of Americans after 9/11 (and the agency that monitored telegrams coming in and out of the United States to detect individuals with communist ties in the 1950s and 1960s)?  Congress has, of course, limited the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping and the President has promised us greater transparency in government decision-making.  Nonetheless, NSA’s oversight over privately-owned systems and wholesale access to their contents raises serious concerns.  And because the NSA will direct these efforts in the name of national security and intelligence, little transparency will be forthcoming.  On another note, the question remains whether it was agency turf-war antics that led to Melissa Hathaway’s decision to leave government–she was the DHS official and most senior cyber expert in the White House who had been a leading candidate for the cyber czar post.  At the time of her resignation, Hathaway told the Washington Post that she “wasn’t willing to continue to wait any longer,” and she wasn’t “empowered” to make any changes.

  October 6, 2009 at 9:12 am   Posted in: Architecture, Cyberlaw, Privacy, Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security), Technology, Uncategorized   Print This Post   2 Comments

Laughter and Forgetting, Misery and Memory?

posted by Danielle Citron

A recurrent theme in Dan Solove’s  important work is the privacy risks attendant to the ever-faster and powerful ability to collect, use and distribute information about us.  Digital dossiers trace and analyze our every move; millions of digital bits help tailor online and offline advertisements, educate employers and insurance companies, and otherwise impact countless decisions about us everyday.  

At the same time, we erect our own digital dossiers about ourselves.  Our iPods teem with favorite songs; hard drives (and handy flash drives) store pictures and videos of loved ones.   This prompts a question about our ability to move past painful episodes, both socially and legally.  Mixed-tapes, love letters, and photos once got lost in the shuffle: tapes melted in glove compartments, letters got tossed in various moves, and photos were torn up.  Yet today digital natives may be more likely to collect, keep, and ruminate over stored music, emails, videos, and photos than past generations.  And even if the young delete those reminders, online sellers and advertisers have long memories–their data-mining programs remember your former (and now painful) love of Led Zeppelin, Chaplin movies, and other shared (and now discarded) passions.  

Will this generation and their successors have a more difficult time moving on from difficult experiences?  Will they remain anchored, and held back, by them?  Aside from the psychological effect of sticky digital memories, will the inability to forget impact law?  Will persistent reminders of painful episodes make us more likely to seek legal action where we otherwise might have moved on?  Or will rapidly-changing technologies render software obsolete, thus having the same effect as the heat in one’s car or a move ensured the discarding of once treasured items?

Stock Xchange Image

  August 18, 2009 at 7:27 am   Posted in: Architecture, Privacy, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

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.

Stock Xchange Photo

  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   Print This Post   2 Comments

Zuckerberg’s Law on Data Sharing, Not Puffery

posted by Danielle Citron

As I noted in a blog post late last year, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, has predicted that “next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and that next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”  He explained that “people are ever more willing to tell others what they are doing, who their friends are and even what they look like as they crawl home from a college party.  Recent statistics support his optimism (and then some).  Yesterday, Zuckerberg announced that his social networking site now has 250 million active users, up from 200 million users just three months ago and 150 million in January.

This development has much significance.  It tells us that social networking is no passing fad — it is deeply embedded in our daily lives and will likely remain so despite many parents’ dismay.  It suggests that we are more connected personally (and perhaps more distracted professionally).  And it means that we entrust Facebook with an exponentially increasing amount of data.  Facebook’s information security practices and privacy policies are thus worth watching carefully.  No doubt, this development will have other far-reaching impacts so your comments are most welcome.

Wikimedia Commons Image

  July 16, 2009 at 12:32 pm   Posted in: Architecture, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Technology, Uncategorized, Web 2.0   Print This Post   One Comment

E-Health: Ushering Doctors Into the Twenty-First Century

posted by Danielle Citron

The stimulus package will devote $20 billion to build the infrastructure of an e-health system, replacing paper records with digital ones that could be cheaply and easily stored and shared. As the New York Times aptly noted on Sunday, protecting the privacy of e-health records is both pressing and daunting. Although upcoming posts will tackle the privacy issue, a threshold discussion concerns the extent to which this proposal will change current practices and health care professionals’ readiness to digitize their work. Health care providers, on the main, are firmly rooted in twentieth-century practices. A recent New England Journal of Medicine survey of 2,700 U.S. doctors revealed that only 4% used “fully functional” e-health records systems and the remaining 96% stored their patient information in paper files. CNN Monday.com reports that only 8% of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians use the kind of computerized record-keeping systems that President Obama envisions for the nation. Computerworld offers more optimistic numbers, suggesting that 25% to 35% of the nation’s hospitals use, or are in the process of implementing, computerized order entry and medical record systems capable of sharing patient data among hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and pharmacies.

Of course, getting doctors computers for their desks won’t do the job. Systems must facilitate safe information sharing. For instance, physicians and hospitals require record-keeping technology and point-of-service technologies, such as notebook tablets for data entry into e-health record systems. Thirty states have made some strides in this direction, introducing or passing legislation that calls for statewide adoption of standardized health IT systems. Massachusetts wants 14,000 private physicians’ offices to adopt e-health records systems by 2012 and its 63 hospitals by 2014. According to the Vice Chairperson of the Massachusetts e-Health Collaborative, the plan will take two to three years and cost $100,000 per physician. Private hospitals have been innovating as well: Duke has created an online medical record site accessible by patients who can share the data with whomever they chose. The CIO for Duke University Health System explains that its portal is akin to “online banking or Expedia account, which pulls information from various sources and displays it to you. You can pay your bills online, schedule appointments online.” Duke uses Google Health and Microsoft Healthvault to permit information sharing beyond its campus.

All of this suggests that health care providers have much work to do, and much money to spend, in transitioning into the e-Health Information Age. Although strong evidence suggests that the downpayment on a digitized health records system is worthwhile, potentially saving the health industry $200 billion to $300 billion a year, we need to spend the money wisely. It would be shameful if we rushed into the project, in much the same way that states acted too quickly to spend the Help America Vote Act funds and ended up buying inaccurate and unsafe electronic voting machines. Let’s be sure not to do the same here.

  February 3, 2009 at 10:13 am   Posted in: Architecture, Health Law, Privacy (Medical)   Print This Post   17 Comments

The Clear and Present Danger of Cyber Warfare

posted by Danielle Citron

Malicious hacking and denial of service attacks are potent weapons of twenty-first century warfare. Recently, Russian and Georgian hackers attacked vital websites in each other’s countries as troops fought on the ground. They shut down government portals. Hackers defaced government websites (e.g., routing visitors to the Georgian President’s website to a site that portrayed him as a modern-day Hitler). Although cyber attackers have not yet significantly disrupted or destroyed government systems in the United States, they have stolen sensitive information about weapon systems from the U.S. government and its defense contractors. Cyber attackers invaded the State Department’s highly sensitive Bureau of Intelligence and Research, posing a risk to CIA operatives in embassies around the world. Online espionage is a serious problem—attacks on military networks were up 55% last year. U.S. officials reportedly believe the attacks come from the Chinese government.

The United States seems to appreciate the dangers of cyber warfare. According to Business Week, the U.S. is engaged in a classified operation to detect, track, and disarm intrusions on the government’s most critical networks. President Bush signed an order known as the Cyber Initiative to overhaul the government’s cyber defenses at a cost in the tens of billions. However, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, National Intelligence Director McConnell asserted that the “federal government is not well protected.” He warned that attackers can enter information systems and destroy data and systems related to the “money supply, electric-power distribution, and transportation sequencing.”

Despite attention to the matter in the U.S., the better part of the world does not take cyber warfare seriously, leaving their networks increasingly vulnerable to attack. This is not unusual—few appreciated the importance and potency of propaganda campaigns at the beginning of World War II until the power of such propaganda became readily apparent and deeply rooted. Broad attention should be paid to cyber attacks. Online sabotage compounds the dangers inherent in national conflicts. Nations may be unable to decelerate tensions through online communications. Cyber attacks convey inaccurate information that can inflame public option, limiting leaders’ political room to defuse tensions. The dangers of cyber warfare thus should not under-estimated.

  September 2, 2008 at 4:58 pm   Posted in: Architecture, Current Events, Privacy (National Security)   Print This Post   One Comment

Controversy at MLK Memorial

posted by William McGeveran

The process of building a new memorial in Washington, DC always creates controversy. The forthcoming Martin Luther King Jr., National Memorial is no exception. The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which has veto power over the design, recently announced its objections to a model of the mammoth statue planned as a centerpiece of the site. The statue, at 28 feet intended to be significantly taller than Lincoln’s at his memorial, depicts Dr. King standing with his arms folded and a very serious expression on his face (see the model here). In a breathtakingly terrible choice of words, the Commission worried that the statute so envisioned is too “confrontational in character.”

This objection comes on top of earlier protests at the choice of a Chinese sculptor, Lei Yixin — some saying that a black person or at least an American should design the statue; others criticizing the use of Chinese granite instead of the good ol’ American kind, and others objecting that some of Lei’s earlier work celebrates Mao Zedong.

The new criticism claims to be aesthetic rather than political, but the two are so fundamentally intertwined in this setting that art cannot distinguish itself from politics. Take, for instance, the following from a Washington Post blogger:

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  May 13, 2008 at 5:00 am   Posted in: Architecture, Civil Rights, Current Events   Print This Post   No Comments

The New Seven Wonders of the World

posted by Daniel Solove

Based on 100 million votes cast from around the world, a new list of “seven wonders” has been created. They are:

Chichén Itzá, Mexico

Christ Redeemer, Brazil

The Great Wall, China

Machu Picchu, Peru

Petra, Jordan

The Roman Colosseum, Italy

The Taj Mahal, India

  July 7, 2007 at 8:06 pm   Posted in: Architecture   Print This Post   7 Comments

Preaching in the Court House: An Experiment in Blog Advertising

posted by Nate Oman

At last January’s AALS meetings, Larry Solum gave advice to new scholars on the use of SSRN, suggesting that it was a good idea to post short, initial versions of an article as a way of generating interest and invitations to workshop one’s piece at other schools. Perhaps blogs can be used in the same way. Hence this post.

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  March 28, 2007 at 10:47 am   Posted in: Architecture, Blogging, History of Law, Law School (Scholarship), Law and Humanities, Religion, Sociology of Law, Weird   Print This Post   5 Comments

Favorite American Architecture

posted by Daniel Solove

The Wall Street Journal has the results of an interesting survey on people’s favorite architecture in America. The top 10:

1. Empire State Building, New York, NY 1931

2. The White House, Washington, DC 1792

3. Washington National Cathedral, Washington DC 1990

4. Thomas Jefferson Memorial, Washington, DC 1943

5. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, CA 1937

6. US Capitol, Washington, DC 1865

7. Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC 1922

8. Biltmore Estates/Vanderbilt Residence, Ashville, NC 1895

9. Chrysler Building, New York, NY 1930

10. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washingon, DC 1982

According to the survey results: “Other than the Bellagio Hotel and Casino, no building of the past decade made it in the top 30 in the poll of 2,000 people by Harris Interactive for the American Institute of Architects.”

I am also pleased that 6 out of the 10 come from Washington, DC, the city I live in.

The WSJ Law Blog notes: “Only three of the most beloved structures were law-related: The U.S. Supreme Court, which clocked in at #15, the University of Michigan Law Library at #94, and the federal courthouse in Islip, N.Y., at #97.”

  February 7, 2007 at 1:55 pm   Posted in: Architecture   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Architecture of Legal Education

posted by Nate Oman

My father is an art historian, and as a child he literally read me books about architecture as bed-time stories. Wild individualist that I am, I gave up on my childhood ambition to become an architect and went to law school. Still, childhood teachings never leave us, and I can’t help but being an architecture snob, indeed something of an architecture reactionary. (My father is a huge fan of Ruskin.) Not surprisingly, I love William & Mary. Indeed, I think that our College has one of the half-dozen or so most beautiful campuses in America. The so-called “Ancient Campus” around the Wren Building boasts some of the oldest academic architecture in North America. (As always, William & Mary and Harvard debate whose buildings are older, a question complicated by fires and moves.) Even the newer part of campus is not that bad. Like most schools, William & Mary expanded when the Baby Boomers went to college, and among the other pernicious effects of that generation was a massive academic building boom right at the aesthetic nadir of Western architecture. In Williamsburg, however, conservatism (if not anachronism) and snobbery in the main carried the day, and the buildings of the 1960s and 1970s are not nearly as hideous as they could be. All and all, it is a good place for an architectural reactionary to work.

Unless, of course, you are a law professor. The Marshall-Wythe School of Law, alas, partakes of essentially none of the main campus’s architectural charm. We are located four or five blocks away from the main campus in a nondescript building begun in the 1970s, which can only garner the faint praise that it is not as ugly as it could have been. It occurs to me that many of the realities of American legal education get played out in the architecture of law schools. William & Mary is certainly not alone in locating its law school away from the main campus. The geographic distance reflects both the intellectual distance — we’re a professional school, law is its own arcane branch of knowledge — and the intellectual anxieities — we aren’t quite taken seriously as real academics, our discipline isn’t sufficiently integrated with others, etc. It also reflects the history and economics of legal education. The law school used to be located on the main quad at William & Mary in cramped quarters in one of the old academic halls. The new building far from the campus represented the economic coming of age of the school and the independence from domination by the central administration. It is the architectural manifestation of the same forces that give me a more comfortable salary than my friends in the government or history departments.

I am curious about law schools without the architectural distance between law and the rest of the campus. Wisconsin comes to mind. Does a physical location at the heart of the University make any intellectual or symbolic difference? Wisconsin, of course, has a tradition of social scientific approaches to the law. Maybe we got Stewart Macauly because of the architecture.

  January 9, 2007 at 1:30 pm   Posted in: Architecture, Law School   Print This Post   4 Comments

David Lat Misses a Trick

posted by Dave Hoffman

David Lat offers this post about a Cravath partner’s recent real estate sale. David makes some hay about a supposed tax break that made the sale even more profitable. It may be therefore worth noting that John Beerbower, the partner in question, was the lead attorney at Cravath on a recently resolved pro bono suit on behalf of the City of New York that resulted in a tax refund of $280,000,000 for New York’s police, firefighters, and sanitation workers injured in the line of duty. The refund resulting from the suit was the second largest in NYC history. (Full disclosure: I worked for John for almost two years. He’s a terrific lawyer and a wonderful person.)

More importantly, how can Lat, despite his well-placed sources (but dubious use of mensch as an adjective), have missed the key detail about that apartment, well-known to a generation of CSM summer associates: the neat round room with the amazingly detailed, historic, wallpaper?

  January 4, 2007 at 3:31 pm   Posted in: Architecture   Print This Post   3 Comments

Finding Jupiter Optimus Maximus

posted by Nate Oman

It is not a horribly original point, but Americans expect a great deal from their courts. If we have some nasty and apparently insoluble social problem, we take it to the men in black robes and expect them to give us wonderful oracular solutions to our problems. (Amazingly, despite two centuries of failing to provide wonderful oracular solutions to social problems, we still go to court!) And of course, we surround our courts with this oracular mystique. The judges wear priestly robes. They emerge from within an inner sanctum in which they commune with the ineffable wisdom of the law. The Supreme Court Building is modeled on a Greek temple, not only in its exterior architecture, but also in its inner lay out. An entrant to the building passes through a succession of courts, each grander than the last. Admission to each court is more closely controlled, until finally one is ushered into the soaring court room where the justices emerge from behind the veil. In ancient and less judicially ambitious times, this architectural experience would have marked a symbolic assent into the presence of the gods, where the priests emerged from behind the veil that shrouded the Ark of the Covenant or the statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

Apparently, we Americans learn this reverence (idolatry?) for the law early. A few weeks ago, I took my four-year-old son with me to the law library to pick up some books. As we walked past shelf upon shelf of the federal reports, my son asked me what those big books were. I pulled down a volume to show him, thinking that I would explain to him what a case and an opinion are. No need. He took one look at the double columned agate type on foolscap paper, and said, “Oh. It’s the scriptures.” I looked down and realized that the reporters do look suspiciously like the family Bible. It would seem that even in our book binding, the law apes the sacred.

  August 24, 2006 at 2:27 pm   Posted in: Architecture, Religion   Print This Post   4 Comments

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