The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies.
Participating in the distribution of child pornography is a federal crime. But that’s exactly what the F.B.I. did in this case. In order to identify more than 1,000 people suspected of trading in child pornography, the F.B.I. operated a child pornography website for nearly two weeks. Read more » about The Government Shouldn’t Distribute Child Pornography. Period.
Here’s the latest in the encryption case we’ve been writing about in which the Justice Department is asking Magistrate Judge James Orenstein to order Apple to unlock a criminal defendant’s passcode-protected iPhone. The government seized and has authority to search the phone pursuant to a search warrant. Read more » about A Quick Update: Apple, Privacy, and the All Writs Act of 1789
Last week, we wrote about an order from a federal magistrate judge in New York that questioned the government’s ability, under an ancient federal law called the All Writs Act, to compel Apple to decrypt a locked device which the government had seized and is authorized to search pursuant to a warrant. Read more » about Update on Apple’s Compelled-Decryption Case
The Obama administration has apparently decided not to support exceptional access proposals that would provide law enforcement with the means to access data on iPhones and other personal devices. Read more » about Lawful Hacking After the Encryption Debate
"“Soon it will be feasible and affordable for the government to record, store and analyze nearly everything we do,” writes law professor Elizabeth Joh in Harvard Law & Policy Review. “The police will rely on alerts generated by computer programs that sift through the massive quantities of available information for patterns of suspicious activity.”" Read more » about Police data could be labelling 'suspects' for crimes they have not committed
"“At some point, the government investigation becomes indistinguishable from the crime, and we should ask whether that’s OK,” said Elizabeth Joh, a
"As we keep moving our lives online, criminals do the same, so we can expect that police will follow and investigate crimes online. But the latest government requests report from Facebook revealed an unexpected and dramatic rise in real-time interceptions, or wiretaps. In the first six months of 2015, US law enforcement agencies sent Facebook 201 wiretap requests (referred to as “Title III” in the report) for 279 users or accounts. Read more » about US Cops Are Asking Facebook to Wiretap More Chats Than Ever Before
"Harlan Yu, who worked on the civil rights report, said the report is meant to help communities.
“You know what we've been hearing from departments across the country is that these are very new technologies, and I think department across the country are experimenting with what works,” Yu said." Read more » about Report: Atlanta Police Body Camera Policy Needs Revising
"The only cities to earn uniformly negative results were Atlanta and Ferguson, a city the group chose to examine in the wake of the controversy following the shooting of Michael Brown last year.
“For both of those departments, their policies were extremely brief and probably the least thought out of all the policies we’ve reviewed,” said Harlan Yu, a principal at Upturn. Read more » about Police endanger civil rights with body camera policies, report says
""Every department has room to improve, even the best in the nation," Harlan Yu, principal at civil rights consulting firm Upturn, told Mic. "And especially the large departments have even further to go." Read more » about If We Want to Throw Body Cameras on Every Police Officer, We're Going to Need Better Laws
"“This is a pretty big deal for law enforcement,” says Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford fellow in computer science and law whose research into Google’s circumvention of cookie-blocking technology helped to spark the class action as well as the search giant’s $17 million settlement with 37 states on the issue. Read more » about Court Says Tracking Web Histories Can Violate Wiretap Act
"Harlan Yu, principle with communications consultant Upturn, said that pre-report viewing -- viewing footage prior to the filing of an officer’s incident report -- creates an uneven playing field. "And in the worst case," Yu added, "an officer could conform his or her report to match only what showed in the video rather than having the report be an independent account of what he or she actually saw." Read more » about Civil Rights Scorecard Analyzes Police Body Cameras, Governance
"About a third of all departments do not make their policies public and readily available on the department's websites. And according to Harlan Yu, a technologist at Upturn, every department examined allows its officers to watch video of an incident before filing a report, giving officers "an undue advantage over other witnesses in a court of law." Read more » about Civil rights group: Police failing to develop bodycam policies
"Almost every department examined allowed officers to watch video of an incident before filing a report. This “gives officers an undue advantage over other witnesses in a court of law,” says Harlan Yu, a technologist at Upturn. Not every policy question was as dismal." Read more » about Many Police Departments Have Dismal Body-Camera Laws
