Latest in Privacy
Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders filed an opening brief on behalf of Jamshid Muhtorov in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Mr.
On Sept. 28, the New York Times published a harrowing, in-depth investigative story on the prevalence of child pornography on the internet. The piece describes a staggering increase in the number of reports to the federal National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) flagging child sexual abuse imagery online from an already-high one million in 2014 to an almost unfathomable 18.4 million in 2018—an increase of almost 1,750 percent in just four years.
Europe’s highest court issued two huge rulings on Sept. 25 regarding the implementation of the EU’s “Right to Be Forgotten.” Both decisions involve a long-standing dispute between Google and France’s data authority, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL); both have considerable implications for the cross-border regulation of the internet.
National Security Agency (NSA) General Counsel Glenn Gerstell presented an interesting and surprising challenge last week, writing in the New York Times that the United States must be ready to face the “profound and enduring implications of the digital revolution.” The essay was interesting in that Gerstell’s writing was almost philosophical, rather than a direct call to action (not exactly a common mode of address for general counsels of intelligence agencies),
Editor's note: This piece originally appeared on TechTank.
Facebook’s recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has reignited debate over whether the agency is up to the task of protecting privacy. Many people, including some skeptics of the FTC’s ability to rein in Silicon Valley, lauded the settlement, or at least parts of it.
On April 23, the Hoover Institution hosted the latest iteration of the Security by the Book series, where Jack Goldsmith interviewed Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman about their new book, “Of Privacy and Power, The Transatlantic Struggle Over Freedom and Security.” They talked about how the relationship between Europe and U.S. has changed in response to regulations and other government action in the security and privacy spheres on both sides of the Atlantic.
According to the Pew Foundation, most Americans lock their cell phones, creating an obstacle for some law enforcement investigations—most notably, the FBI in its 2016 standoff with Apple over access to the San Bernardino attacker’s iPhone—and especially for state authorities, which have fewer resources than
On March 6, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a long-term road map to turn Facebook into a “privacy-focused communications platform.” His “principles” for this transformation include auto-deleting old user content and choosing “not to build data centers in countries that have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression,” even if that gets Facebook blocked from lucrative markets such as China or Russia.
Last month, a divided chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (“ECHR”) (that is, a panel of seven judges from ECHR’s “First Section”) issued an opinion declaring several aspects of British surveillance law to be in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case is called, perhaps inevitably, Big Brother Watch and Others v. The United Kingdom. The opinion is ponderous, to say the least.
There’s a lot going on in the privacy and data protection world. But one of the most pressing issues is the uncertain fate of Privacy Shield, the framework governing the flow of data between the EU and the U.S. for commercial purposes.