Law Commons^™

Shields Up For Software, Derek E. Bambauer, Melanie J. Teplinsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article contends that the National Cybersecurity Strategy's software liability regime should incorporate two safe harbors. The first would shield software creators and vendors from liability for decisions related to design, implementation, and maintenance, as long as those choices follow enumerated best practices. The second—the “inverse safe harbor”—would have the opposite effect: coders and distributors who engaged in defined worst practices would automatically become liable. This Article explains the design, components, and justifications for these twin safe harbors. The software safe harbors are key parts of the overall design of the new liability regime and work in tandem with the …

Data Transfers After Schrems Ii: The Eu-Us Disagreements Over Data Privacy And National Security, Monika Zalnieriute

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In the long-awaited Schrems II decision, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) took a radical, although not an unexpected, step in invalidating the Privacy Shield Agreement, which facilitated data transfers between the European Union and the United States. Schrems II illuminates long-lasting international disagreements between the EU and the United States over data protection, national security, and the fundamental differences between the public and private approaches to the protection of human rights in the data-driven economy and modern state. This Article approaches the decision via an interdisciplinary lens of international law and international relations and situates it …

Deep Fakes: The Algorithms That Create And Detect Them And The National Security Risks They Pose, Nick Dunard

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

The dissemination of deep fakes for nefarious purposes poses significant national security risks to the United States, requiring an urgent development of technologies to detect their use and strategies to mitigate their effects. Deep fakes are images and videos created by or with the assistance of AI algorithms in which a person’s likeness, actions, or words have been replaced by someone else’s to deceive an audience. Often created with the help of generative adversarial networks, deep fakes can be used to blackmail, harass, exploit, and intimidate individuals and businesses; in large-scale disinformation campaigns, they can incite political tensions around the …

Adapting U.S. Electronic Surveillance Laws, Policies, And Practices To Reflect Impending Technological Developments, Eric Manpearl

Catholic University Law Review

Intelligence collection must always evolve to meet technological developments. While the collection programs under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 have produced a great deal of valuable intelligence over the last decade, the United States must begin to think about foreseeable technological developments and strategically consider how to conduct signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection in the future.

This Article identifies four technological trends that could significantly impact the way the United States conducts SIGINT. Individuals now have access to sophisticated technologies that formerly only governments seemed capable of creating, and this decentralization of capabilities will likely only increase …

A Section-By-Section Analysis Of Maine's Freedom Of Access Act, Anne C. Lucey

Maine Law Review

There seems to be no absolute freedom of information. Even President Lyndon B. Johnson's declaration made on July 4, 1966, as he signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law, indicates the limitations accompanying most right-to-know laws from their inception. A delicate balance must be struck between the public's access to public business and the public interest, between the public's access and a person's right to privacy, and, at the federal level, between the public's access and national security. Maine also crafted a limited freedom of information law, the Freedom of Access Act ("FOAA" or "the Act"), seven years …

Functional Secrecy, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Many theorists consider secrecy inimical to liberal democracy. Precise examination of the role that it plays in contemporary government, however, including its strengths and weaknesses, has been limited. This chapter, accordingly, lays out a functional theory of secrecy, considering its role in the three branches of government in four contexts: deliberation, information security, law, and adjudicatory processes. Whether and to what extent cloaking information advances the interests of the state and society varies according to how it operates in each category. First, deliberative secrecy carries significant advantages: it can facilitate informed debate and honest exchange, allowing individuals to alter their …

21st Century-Style Truth Decay: Deep Fakes And The Challenge For Privacy, Free Expression, And National Security, Robert Chesney, Danielle Keats Citron

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

If The Legislature Had Been Serious About Data Privacy..., Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Orla Lynskey, Christopher Millard, Nora Ni Loideain, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Fight Over Encryption: Reasons Why Congress Must Block The Government From Compelling Technology Companies To Create Backdoors Into Their Devices, Shannon Lear

Cleveland State Law Review

Advances in technology in the past decade have blurred the line between individuals’ privacy rights and the government’s ability to access information. How should this issue be handled in a manner that balances the privacy rights of individuals and the government’s access to information in the interest of national security?

This Note proposes a bright-line rule that would continue to allow the government to obtain specific information from a data service provider without forcing the company to circumvent its own security features. Under this rule, a company shall relinquish specific information in its control or possession only by court order …

An Unstoppable Force And An Immoveable Object? Eu Data Protection Law And National Security, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Orla Lynskey, Christopher Millard, Nora Ni Loideain, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

From The National Surveillance State To The Cybersurveillance State, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

This article anchors the phenomenon of bureaucratized cybersurveillance around the concept of the National Surveillance State, a theory attributed to Professor Jack Balkin of Yale Law School and Professor Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas School of Law. Pursuant to the theory of the National Surveillance State, because of the routinized and administrative nature of government-led surveillance, normalized mass surveillance is viewed as justified under crime and counterterrorism policy rationales. This article contends that the Cybersurveillance State is the successor to the National Surveillance State. The Cybersurveillance State harnesses technologies that fuse biometric and biographic data for risk assessment, …

Social Justice And Silicon Valley: A Perspective On The Apple-Fbi Case And The “Going Dark” Debate, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Standing After Snowden: Lessons On Privacy Harm From National Security Surveillance Litigation, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Article III standing is difficult to achieve in the context of data security and data privacy claims. Injury in fact must be "concrete," "particularized," and "actual or imminent"--all characteristics that are challenging to meet with information harms. This Article suggests looking to an unusual source for clarification on privacy and standing: recent national security surveillance litigation. There we can find significant discussions of what rises to the level of Article III injury in fact. The answers may be surprising: the interception of sensitive information; the seizure of less sensitive information and housing of it in a database for analysis; and …

Small Data Surveillance V. Big Data Cybersurveillance, Margaret Hu

Margaret Hu

This Article highlights some of the critical distinctions between small data surveillance and big data cybersurveillance as methods of intelligence gathering. Specifically, in the intelligence context, it appears that “collect-it-all” tools in a big data world can now potentially facilitate the construction, by the intelligence community, of other individuals' digital avatars. The digital avatar can be understood as a virtual representation of our digital selves and may serve as a potential proxy for an actual person. This construction may be enabled through processes such as the data fusion of biometric and biographic data, or the digital data fusion of the …

Trending @ Rwulaw: Professor Peter Margulies's Post: Cybersecurity: A 'Must-Know' For Lawyers And Citizens, Peter Margulies

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Eliminating The No Number, No List Response; Keeping The Cia Within The Scope Of The Law Amidst America's Global War On Terror, Joseph Meissner

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Small Data Surveillance V. Big Data Cybersurveillance, Margaret Hu

Pepperdine Law Review

This Article highlights some of the critical distinctions between small data surveillance and big data cybersurveillance as methods of intelligence gathering. Specifically, in the intelligence context, it appears that “collect-it-all” tools in a big data world can now potentially facilitate the construction, by the intelligence community, of other individuals' digital avatars. The digital avatar can be understood as a virtual representation of our digital selves and may serve as a potential proxy for an actual person. This construction may be enabled through processes such as the data fusion of biometric and biographic data, or the digital data fusion of the …

Standing And Covert Surveillance, Christopher Slobogin

Pepperdine Law Review

This Article describes and analyzes standing doctrine as it applies to covert government surveillance, focusing on practices thought to be conducted by the National Security Agency. Primarily because of its desire to avoid judicial incursions into the political process, the Supreme Court has construed its standing doctrine in a way that makes challenges to covert surveillance very difficult. Properly understood, however, such challenges do not call for judicial trenching on the power of the legislative and executive branches. Instead, they ask the courts to ensure that the political branches function properly. This political process theory of standing can rejuvenate the …

Clapper V. Amnesty International Usa: Balancing National Security And Individuals' Privacy, Kristen Choi

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

When The Curtain Must Be Drawn: American Experience With Proceedings Involving Information That, For Reasons Of National Security, Cannot Be Disclosed, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In numerous contexts today, ranging from no-fly lists, to the designation of foreign terrorist organizations, to controls over foreign investments in the United States, federal authorities reach decisions having dramatic consequences for individuals’ liberty and property on the basis of information that those individuals cannot obtain, even in summary form. Recent and pending litigation has challenged these deprivations on due process grounds, with only moderate success. Perhaps unclassified information on which the government has acted must be revealed, with an opportunity given to challenge it and to submit contrary evidence; but in the words of the DC Circuit writing last …

Surveillance, Speech Suppression And Degradation Of The Rule Of Law In The “Post-Democracy Electronic State”, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

None of us can claim the quality of original insight achieved by Alexis de Tocqueville in his early 19th Century classic Democracy in America in his observation that the “soft” repression of democracy was unlike that in any other political form. It is impossible to deny that we in the US, the United Kingdom and Western Europe are experiencing just such a “gentle” drift of the kind that Tocqueville describes, losing our democratic integrity amid an increasingly “pretend” democracy. He explained: “[T]he supreme power [of government] then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society …

Warrant Canaries Beyond The First Amendment: A Comment, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Warrant canaries have emerged as an intriguing tool for Internet companies to provide some measure of transparency for users while also complying with national security laws. Though there is at least a reasonable argument for the legality of warrant canaries in the U.S. based primarily on First Amendment "compelled speech" doctrine, the same cannot be said for the use of warrant canaries in other "Five Eyes” intelligence agency countries — United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia — where the legality of warrant canaries has yet to be examined in either cases or scholarship. This comment, which provides an overview …

Global Governance In The Information Age: The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Europe has long been deemed "more protective" of privacy than the United States. In the context of transatlantic cooperation in the war on terrorism, divergences in privacy law and policy have become ever more apparent. As has always been the case, the same technologies that pose new and vital privacy issues with regard to personal information and private data are those that are important sources for government actors, including law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Despite the increasing reliance by national agencies on information flowing from other nations, regulation of information transfer, processing and sharing has been achieved largely outside of …

Do We Need A New Fourth Amendment?, Orin S. Kerr

Michigan Law Review

Slobogin's book offers a new conceptualization of the Fourth Amendment rooted in what he calls the proportionality principle: An investigative technique should be permitted under the Constitution only if the strength of the government's justification for the technique is roughly proportionate to the level of intrusion it causes . Slobogin roots this principle in Terry v. Ohio and its pragmatic balancing of law-enforcement and privacy interests. To determine how much justification the Fourth Amendment requires, Slobogin argues, courts should assess the intrusiveness of the investigatory technique and then set a proportionate threshold of proof that the government must show. The …

Book Review, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

No abstract provided.

"Doublethink"Ing Privacy Under The Multi-State Antiterrorism Information Exchange, Thomas V. Burch

Scholarly Works

This Article examines the development of the Matrix program and analyzes its effect on what Justices Warren and Brandeis termed the individual's "right to be let alone." To understand the Matrix's effect on individual privacy, one must scrutinize the program in the context of United States history.From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the Red Squads of the 1960s and 1970.

Part II of this Article examines how civil liberties often suffer unnecessarily in times of national crisis. Part III then discusses how this truism applies in the current "war on terror" and details the development and operation of the …

The Constitutionality Of The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Of 1978, Judith B. Anderson

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Within its more limited scope, the Belfield decision provides a helpful approach to FISA cases by articulating both a solid rationale for FISA's in camera, ex parte provision and a workable balancing approach for determining whether open proceedings may be necessary. The Falvey decision, although broader in scope, does not provide a satisfactory rationale for FISA's deviation from the traditional fourth amendment warrant requirement, nor does it articulate a workable approach to evaluating a FISA-warranted surveillance. The Falvey court, by predicating its upholding of FISA on an acceptance of the national security exception, may perpetuate a debate that the statute …