Computer Law Commons^™

The Survival Of Critical Infrastructure: How Do We Stop Ransomware Attacks On Hospitals?, Helena Roland

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Our nation’s infrastructure is under an emerging new threat: ransomware attacks. These attacks can cause anything from individual laptops, to entire cities to shut down for a period of time until the victim pays a ransom to the attacker. Unfortunately, these attacks are on the rise and the attackers have a new target: hospitals. Ransomware attacks on hospitals can temporarily shut down operating room technology and limit physician access to patient files, ultimately threatening the safety of hospital patients and the surrounding community. This paper examines how the threat of ransomware attacks on hospitals is on the rise and what …

Cyberattacks And The Constitution, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

Contrary to popular view, cyberattacks alone are rarely exercises of constitutional war powers – and they might never be. They are often instead best understood as exercises of other powers pertaining to nonwar military, foreign affairs, intelligence, and foreign commerce, for example. Although this more fine-grained, fact-specific conception of cyberattacks leaves room for broad executive leeway in some contexts, it also contains a strong constitutional basis for legislative regulation of cyber operations.

A Dangerous Inheritance: A Child’S Digital Identity, Kate Hamming

Seattle University Law Review

This Comment begins with one family’s story of its experience with social media that many others can relate to in today’s ever-growing world of technology and the Internet. Technology has made it possible for a person’s online presence to grow exponentially through continuous sharing by other Internet users. This ability to communicate and share information amongst family, friends, and strangers all over the world, while beneficial in some regard, comes with its privacy downfalls. The risks to privacy are elevated when children’s information is being revealed, which often stems from a child’s own parents conduct online. Parents all over the …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

When Miracle Cures Go Bad: Regulators’ Responses To Unproven Direct-To-Consumer Stem Cell Therapies, Sydney Hope

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

The Internet Never Forgets: A Federal Solution To The Dissemination Of Nonconsensual Pornography, Alexis Santiago

Seattle University Law Review

As technology evolves, new outlets for interpersonal conflict and crime evolve with it. The law is notorious for its inability to keep pace with this evolution. This Comment focuses on one area that the law urgently needs to regulate—the dissemination of “revenge porn,” otherwise known as nonconsensual pornography. Currently, no federal law exists in the U.S. that criminalizes the dissemination of nonconsensual pornography. Most U.S. states have criminalized the offense, but with vastly different degrees of severity, resulting in legal inconsistencies and jurisdictional conflicts. This Comment proposes a federal solution to the dissemination of nonconsensual pornography that carefully balances the …

Spyware Vs. Spyware: Software Conflicts And User Autonomy, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Protecting Online Privacy In The Digital Age: Carpenter V. United States And The Fourth Amendment’S Third-Party Doctrine, Cristina Del Rosso, Carol M. Bast

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

The goal of this paper is to examine the future of the third-party doctrine with the proliferation of technology and the online data we are surrounded with daily, specifically after the Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States. It is imperative that individuals do not forfeit their Constitutional guarantees for the benefit of living in a technologically advanced society. This requires an understanding of the modern-day functional equivalents of “papers” and “effects.”

Looking to the future, this paper contemplates solutions on how to move forward in this technology era by scrutinizing the relevancy of the third-party doctrine due …

Notice And Choice Must Go: The Collective Control Alternative, Richard Warner

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Over twenty years of criticism conclusively confirm that Notice and Choice results in, as the law professor Fred Cate puts it, “the worst of all worlds: privacy protection is not enhanced, individuals and businesses pay the cost of bureaucratic laws.” So why is it still the dominant legislative and regulatory approach to ensuring adequate informational privacy online? Recent implementations of Notice and Choice include the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, and California’s Consumer Protection Privacy Act. There is a well-known alternative (advanced by Helen Nissenbaum and others) that sees informational privacy as arising from social norms that require conformity …

Transactional Scripts In Contract Stacks, Shaanan Cohney, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

Deals accomplished through software persistently residing on computer networks—sometimes called smart contracts, but better termed transactional scripts—embody a potentially revolutionary contracting innovation. Ours is the first precise account in the legal literature of how such scripts are created, and when they produce errors of legal significance.

Scripts’ most celebrated use case is for transactions operating exclusively on public, permissionless, blockchains: such exchanges eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries and seem to permit parties to commit ex ante to automated performance. But public transactional scripts are costly both to develop and execute, with significant fees imposed for data storage. Worse, bugs …

Machines Finding Injustice, Hannah S. Laquer, Ryan W. Copus

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

With rising caseloads, review systems are increasingly taxed, stymieing traditional methods of case screening. We propose an automated solution: predictive models of legal decisions can be used to identify and focus review resources on outlier decisions—those decisions that are most likely the product of biases, ideological extremism, unusual moods, and carelessness and thus most at odds with a court’s considered, collective judgment. By using algorithms to find and focus human attention on likely injustices, adjudication systems can largely sidestep the most serious objections to the use of algorithms in the law: that algorithms can embed racial biases, deprive parties of …

Politics Of Adversarial Machine Learning, Kendra Albert, Jonathon Penney, Bruce Schneier, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In addition to their security properties, adversarial machine-learning attacks and defenses have political dimensions. They enable or foreclose certain options for both the subjects of the machine learning systems and for those who deploy them, creating risks for civil liberties and human rights. In this paper, we draw on insights from science and technology studies, anthropology, and human rights literature, to inform how defenses against adversarial attacks can be used to suppress dissent and limit attempts to investigate machine learning systems. To make this concrete, we use real-world examples of how attacks such as perturbation, model inversion, or membership inference …

Ethical Testing In The Real World: Evaluating Physical Testing Of Adversarial Machine Learning, Kendra Albert, Maggie Delano, Jonathon Penney, Afsaneh Ragot, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper critically assesses the adequacy and representativeness of physical domain testing for various adversarial machine learning (ML) attacks against computer vision systems involving human subjects. Many papers that deploy such attacks characterize themselves as “real world.” Despite this framing, however, we found the physical or real-world testing conducted was minimal, provided few details about testing subjects and was often conducted as an afterthought or demonstration. Adversarial ML research without representative trials or testing is an ethical, scientific, and health/safety issue that can cause real harms. We introduce the problem and our methodology, and then critique the physical domain testing …

Cyber Insurance Today: Saving It Before It Needs Saving, Angela Nieves

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Cyber insurance, which covers a company’s losses and costs stemming from a cyberattack, represents a nearly $5 billion global market. But have stakeholders shaped a sustainable model? This article analyzes contrasting claims about the viability of cyber insurance. It proposes measures to ensure the survival of the cyber insurance market, which should be immediately addressed given the current state of the world and the fact that even pre-COVID-19, businesses worldwide stood to lose over $5.2 trillion over the next five years due to cybercrimes. Unless action is taken to mitigate the fallout from cyber events, the cyber insurance market will …