Internet Law Commons^™

Warrantless Searches Of Electronic Devices At U.S. Borders: Securing The Nation Or Violating Digital Liberty?, Ahad Khilji

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

The steady increase of U.S. citizens traveling with smart phones and other electronic devices has been met with the rise of searches and seizures by CBP officers at U.S borders. Although only less than 0.1% of all travelers may actually be subjected to a search while entering the United States, when comparing the statistics between a six month period in 2016 with the same period in 2017, electronic device searches have almost doubled from 8,383 to 14,993. Approximately one million travelers to the U.S. are inspected by the CBP every day. Out of this population, nearly 2,500 electronic devices are …

Intermediaries And Private Speech Regulation: A Transatlantic Dialogue - Workshop Report, Tiffany Li

Faculty Scholarship

The Wikimedia/Yale Law School Initiative on Intermediaries and Information (WIII) at Yale Law School has released a comprehensive report synthesizing key insights from intermediary liability and online speech and expression experts in Europe and the United States.

The report focuses on the critical but complicated issue of private speech regulation on the internet and the connections between platform liability laws and fundamental rights, including free expression. The report reflects discussions held at “Intermediaries & Private Speech Regulation: A Transatlantic Dialogue,” an invitation-only workshop convened by WIII, featuring leading internet law experts from the United States and Europe.

This report highlights …

Facebook Nudes And Constitutional Feuds: How One State's Law Threatens The First Amendment, Bryan M. Kelly

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Shackled Speech: How President Trump's Treatment Of The Press And The Citizen-Critic Undermines The Central Meaning Of The First Amendment, Terri R. Day, Danielle Weatherby

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Just recently, the Southern District of New York in Knight First Amendment, Inc. v. Trump applied existing First Amendment doctrine to President Trump’s @realDonaldTrump Twitter account in considering whether he violated the First Amendment when he blocked citizens from accessing his tweets. After concluding that the interactive space associated with each of the President’s tweets is a designated public forum, the District Court held that President Trump’s act of blocking users who criticize him constituted viewpoint-based discrimination, which violates the First Amendment. This Article is one of the first of its kind to analyze the question considered by the Knight …

Speech Across Borders, Jennifer Daskal

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

As both governments and tech companies seek to regulate speech online, these efforts raise critical, and contested, questions about how far those regulations can and should extend. Is it enough to take down or delink material in a geographically segmented way? Or can and should tech companies be ordered to takedown or delink unsavory content across their entire platforms—no matter who is posting the material or where the unwanted content is viewed? How do we deal with conflicting speech norms across borders? And how do we protect against the most censor-prone nation effectively setting global speech rules? These questions were …

Global Platform Governance: Private Power In The Shadow Of The State, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

SMU Law Review

Online intermediaries—search engines, social media platforms, even e-commerce businesses—are increasingly required to make critical decisions about free expression, individual privacy, and property rights under domestic law. These requirements arise in contexts that include the right to be forgotten, hate speech,“ terrorist” speech, and copyright and intellectual property. At the same time, these disputes about online speech are increasingly borderless. Many laws targeting online speech and privacy are explicitly extraterritorial in scope. Even when not, some courts have ruled that they have jurisdiction to enforce compliance on a global scale. And governments are also demanding that platforms remove content—on a global …

Dialing It Back: Why Courts Should Rethink Students’ Privacy And Speech Rights As Cell Phone Communications Erode The ‘Schoolhouse Gate’, Nicholas J. Mcguire

Duke Law & Technology Review

The ubiquity of cell phones in today’s society has forced courts to change or dismiss established, but inapplicable analytical frameworks. Two such frameworks in the school setting are regulations of student speech and of student searches. This Article traces the constitutional jurisprudence of both First Amendment off-campus speech protection and Fourth Amendment search standards as applied to the school setting. It then analyzes how the Supreme Court’s ruling in Riley v. California complicates both areas. Finally, it proposes a pragmatic solution: by recognizing a categorical First Amendment exception for “substantial threats” against the school community, courts could accommodate students’ constitutional …

Symposium: Truth, Trust And The First Amendment In The Digital Age: Foreword: Whither The Fourth Estate?, Lyrissa Lidsky

Missouri Law Review

As a professor of Media Law, I have devoted my career over the past quarter of a century to the idea that the press plays a special role in our democracy. That role is largely encapsulated by the concept of the press as Fourth Estate – an unofficial branch of government in our scheme of separation of powers that checks the power of the three official branches. In our constitutional scheme, the press is the watchdog that informs us what the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government are up to and continually replenishes the stock of news – real …

You Can’T Say That!: Public Forum Doctrine And Viewpoint Discrimination In The Social Media Era, Micah Telegen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The growing prevalence of privately-owned social media platforms is changing the way Americans and their governments communicate. This shift offers new opportunities, but also requires a reinterpretation of the First Amendment’s proscription of government limitations of speech. The public forum doctrine and its proscription of viewpoint discrimination seem particularly stretched by the digital revolution and the development of social media. In ongoing cases, litigants and courts have invoked the doctrine to limit the government’s ability to ‘block’ those who comment critically on government pages—much to the chagrin of those who note the private status of the companies hosting the pages …

Keynote Address, Ryan Calo

Seattle University Law Review

Transcript of the keynote address at the 2018 Seattle University School of Law symposium “Singularity: AI and the Law.” The keynote address is presented by Ryan Calo and discusses the current status of artificial intelligence learning, and how this current status is moving toward robotic singularity.

Robotic Speakers And Human Listeners, Helen Norton

Seattle University Law Review

This article discusses protected First Amendment speech and how this protection should be applied to robotic speech. Robotic speech is that created by automated means, currently “bots” but the producers of automated speech are evolving. The article further differentiates between rights of the producers of this speech and listeners or consumers of the speech, and the impact of First Amendment protections on each group.

Panel 2: Accountability For The Actions Of Robots, Ryan Calo, Howard Jay Chizeck, Elizabeth Joh, Blake Hannaford

Seattle University Law Review

Transcript of the panel discussion at the 2018 Seattle University School of Law symposium “Singularity: AI and the Law” discussing human control and Artificial Intellegence learning. The panel participants are Ryan Calo, Howard Jay Chizeck, Elizabeth Joh, and Blake Hannaford.

Ethical Machines?, Ariela Tubert

Seattle University Law Review

This Article explores the possibility of having ethical artificial intelligence. It argues that we face a dilemma in trying to develop artificial intelligence that is ethical: either we have to be able to codify ethics as a set of rules or we have to value a machine’s ability to make ethical mistakes so that it can learn ethics like children do. Neither path seems very promising, though perhaps by thinking about the difficulties with each we may come to a better understanding of artificial intelligence and ourselves.

Panel 1: Robotic Speech And The First Amendment, Bruce E. H. Johnson, Helen Norton, David Skover

Seattle University Law Review

Transcript of the panel discussion at the 2018 Seattle University School of Law symposium “Singularity: AI and the Law.” The panel is moderated by Seattle University School of Law Professor Gregory Silverman, and discusses the forthcoming book Robotica, by David M. Skover and Ronald K. L. Collins. The panelists are Bruce E. H. Johnson, Helen Norton, and David M. Skover.

Virtual Ethics And The Creeper Act, Justin Tiehen

Seattle University Law Review

A legal and moral discussion of the development of child sex bots (CSB), childlike sex dolls, comparing society-at-large’s general squeamishness of the area, and attempts to regulate (for example, the CREEPER Act) with the prophylactic therapeutic benefits of these robots.

Artificial Intellegence And Policing: First Questions, Elizabeth E. Joh

Seattle University Law Review

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly larger role in all sectors of society, including policing. Many police departments are already using artificial intelligence (AI) to help predict and identify suspicious persons and places.1 Increased computational power and oceans of data have given rise to inferences about violence and threats.2 AI will change policing just as it will healthcare, insurance, commerce, and transportation. But what questions should we ask about AI and policing?

Introduction, Annette Clark

Seattle University Law Review

Introductory remarks given by Dean Annette Clark at the 2018 Seattle University School of Law symposium “Singularity: AI and the Law.”

The Problem Isn't Just Backpage: Revising Section 230 Immunity, Danielle K. Citron, Benjamin Wittes

Faculty Scholarship

Backpage is a classifieds hub that hosts “80 percent of the online advertising for illegal commercial sex in the United States.” This is not by happenstance but rather by design. Evidence suggests that the advertising hub selectively removed postings discouraging sex trafficking. The site also tailored its rules to protect the practice from detection, including allowing anonymized email and photographs stripped of metadata. Under the prevailing interpretation of 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”) of the CDA, however, Backpage would be immune from liability connected to sex trafficking even though it proactively helped sex traffickers from getting caught. No matter …

Search Query: Can America Accept A Right To Be Forgotten As A Publicity Right?, James J. Lavelle

Brooklyn Law Review

Search engines have profoundly changed the relationship between privacy and free speech by making personal information widely and cheaply available to a global audience. This has raised many concerns both over how online companies handle the information they collect and how regular citizens use online services to invade other people’s privacy. One way Europe has addressed this change is by providing European Union citizens with a right to petition search engines to deindex links from search results—a so-called “right to be forgotten.” If the information contained in a search result is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant,” the search engine …

The Resilient Foundation Of Democracy: The Legal Deconstruction Of The Washington Posts's Condemnation Of Edward Snowden, Hanna Kim

Indiana Law Journal

On September 17, 2016, The Washington Post (“the Post”) made history by being the first paper to ever call for the criminal prosecution of its own source —Edward Snowden. Yet, two years prior to this editorial, the Post accepted the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for its “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency”—an honor which would not have been bestowed had Snowden not leaked the documents through this news outlet. The other three major media outlets that received and published Snowden’s documents and findings—The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Intercept—all have taken the …

Extremist Speech, Compelled Conformity, And Censorship Creep, Danielle Keats Citron

Notre Dame Law Review

Silicon Valley has long been viewed as a full-throated champion of First Amendment values. The dominant online platforms, however, have recently adopted speech policies and processes that depart from the U.S. model. In an agreement with the European Commission, the dominant tech companies have pledged to respond to reports of hate speech within twenty-four hours, a hasty process that may trade valuable expression for speedy results. Plans have been announced for an industry database that will allow the same companies to share hashed images of banned extremist content for review and removal elsewhere. These changes are less the result of …

"Fake News," No News, And The Needs Of Local Communities, Carol Pauli

Faculty Scholarship

The Quaker authors had in mind an ancient truth - that "love endures and overcomes" - and they were convinced that this truth is accessible to all. This article addresses truth at a more immediate and mundane level. It is concerned with the accurate information that local communities need in order to thrive.

The article proceeds in three steps. Part I reviews one way community needs were addressed when the first large-scale electronic communication technology entered individual homes in the form of radio and television. In those days, broadcasters had an affirmative duty to ascertain the problems of the communities …

Exposing Secret Searches: A First Amendment Right Of Access To Electronic Surveillance Orders, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Although, as a rule, court proceedings and judicial records are presumptively open to the public, electronic surveillance documents are exceptions. Like ordinary search warrants, surveillance applications are considered ex parte. But court orders frequently remain sealed indefinitely, even when there is no basis for continued secrecy. Indeed, secrecy — in the form of gag orders, local judicial rules, and even clerical filing and docketing practices — is built into the laws that regulate electronic surveillance.

This Article argues that this widespread secrecy violates the First Amendment right of access to court proceedings and documents. The history of search and seizure …

Masthead

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Contents

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Sexual Privacy, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Those who wish to control and expose the identities of women and people from marginalized communities routinely do so by invading their privacy. People are secretly recorded in bedrooms and public bathrooms, and “up their skirts.” They are coerced into sharing nude photographs and filming sex acts under the threat of public disclosure of their nude images. People’s nude images are posted online without permission. Machine-learning technology is used to create digitally manipulated “deep fake” sex videos that swap people’s faces into pornography.

At the heart of these abuses is an invasion of sexual privacy—the behaviors and expectations that manage …

Table Of Contents, Editor In Chief

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Assessing Assisted Reproductive Technology, Raymond C. O'Brien

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Technological innovation possesses both opportunity and challenge. Because assisted reproductive technology (ART) involves sexual intimacy, parenthood, personhood, gender identity, privacy, legacy, and a plethora of religious, historical, sociological, and ethical underpinnings, the challenges presented in such technological innovation are substantial. Nonetheless, the opportunities are significant and progressive. Because of in vitro fertilization, gestational and genetic surrogacy, posthumous conception, and mitochondrial replacement therapy, humans now have the opportunity to overcome infertility, gender obstacles to parentage, dynastic limitations, and diseases that have long plagued mothers and infants. However, challenges include the exploitation of surrogates, unequal access to ART services, possibilities of cloning …

Privacy Of Information And Dna Testing Kits, Shanna Raye Mason

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

In modern times, consumers desire for more control over their own health and healthcare. With this growing interest of control, direct to consumer DNA testing kits have never been more popular. However, many consumers are unaware of the potential privacy concerns associated with such use. This comment examines the popularity and privacy risks that are likely unknown to the individual consumer. This comment also addresses the shortcomings of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), as well as the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) in regard to protecting individual’s genetic information from misuse. This comment …

Masthead, Editor In Chief

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.