Crawford and ID Creep

Thanks to the Concurring Opinions gang for inviting me back for another visit!
I will leave it to the likes of the incredible Rick Hasen and SCOTUSBlog’s Lyle Deniston — among many, many others — to talk about the important election law elements of Monday’s Supreme Court decision on voter identification in Crawford v. Marion County […]

N.J. Constitution Requires Subpoena for ISP Data

The New Jersey Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision on Monday ruling that the state’s constitution goes further than the United States Constitution by requiring a warrant before the government can obtain subscriber information from an information service provider (such as linking a name to an IP address). Under controlling Fourth Amendment precedent, individuals […]

U.S. Intelligence Eyes Second Life

Robert O’Harrow, a Washington Post reporter who is very insightful and current in his coverage of data privacy (and author of a good book on it too), today chronicles the inevitable first stirrings of government fear about virtual worlds such as Second Life:
Intelligence officials who have examined these systems say they’re convinced that the qualities […]

What Is Your Favorite Annoying Question?

A funny piece at Slate rants about the “security” questions increasingly asked by financial institutions in a doomed attempt to foil hackers and phishers. It links to this funnier rant by David Weinberger. (I’ve also complained about the privacy concerns related to this before, but that’s not so funny). As Slate sums […]

Facebook Retreats Somewhat on Beacon Privacy

In response to a growing revolt by its members, and particularly an online protest organized by MoveOn.org, on Friday Facebook quietly retreated somewhat in implementation of some of its new privacy-invasive advertising plans.
Apparently the “Beacon” feature, which tells your Facebook “friends” when you buy something from a participating retailer, will shift from an opt-out (and […]

Reputation Economies Symposium at Yale

On December 8th I’ll have the privilege of speaking alongside many smart people at a symposium put on by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The title is Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. The topic could hardly be more timely. Admission to the day-long event, sponsored by Microsoft, is available to […]

A Beautiful Example of An Anonymous Quote

There is a lot of criticism of the use of the anonymous source in Washington reporting, much of it justified. But there is no doubting the bottom line that political reporters sometimes need the tool in order to get honest views. Case in point: the Washington Post gives us this comment about Republican […]

Teaching Non-Lawyers

In the last few days I’ve been at two gigs involving teaching about law to non-lawyers. It is an eye-opening and highly recommended experience.
Last week I was on the faculty of the annual Summer Doctoral Programme sponsored by the Oxford Internet Institute and this year hosted in the U.S. by the Berkman Center at […]

Sex, Laws, and Videotape (Genarlow Wilson Edition)

Genarlow Wilson, you may recall, is the young man sentenced to a 10-year mandatory sentence in Georgia for occurrences at a wild hotel room New Year’s Eve party with other high schoolers when he was 17 years old. He was acquitted of raping a 17-year-old girl who said that she was intoxicated and that […]

Piercing the Veil of Anonymous Bloggers

[Cross-posted at Concurring Opinions.]
Brian Leiter notes this news story about a South Korean law which has just taken effect, requiring large web sites to obtain real names and the equivalent of Social Security numbers from everyone who posts content. He compares this approach to that taken in the US where, he says, “there exist only […]

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