Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Audio from our January symposium, Search and Seizure in the Digital Age, is available for three of the five speaker panels.

• Freiwald panel: Jennifer Granick (CIS), Orin Kerr (G.W.), Erin Murphy (Boalt)
• Ohm panel: Lauren Gelman (CIS), Don Dripps (San Diego), Richard Downing (CCIPS)
• Ozer panel: Bob Weisberg (SLS), Alexandra Natapoff (Loyola), David Molnar (Bekerley)

I have posted pictures from our live symposium event last Friday on my Flickr page. Thanks to everyone who helped make the event a success!

Also, thanks to Lauren for pointing out this article, which mentions the symposium in a c|net News article about FBI wiretapping methods.

At the end of our last panel, an older gentleman walked into the room, introduced himself as a Berkeley graduate, and proceeded to engage in an entirely off-topic tirade against "the establishment." He eventually stopped and now is sitting amicably in his seat.

Wait -- he got up again and wants to participate further -- wait, Kevin Bankston has dibs on the microphone. Phew.

There's always another perspective we have to consider in the privacy debate. Matt Lamberti, Asst. U.S. Attorney, just noted that "when you talk about things being creepy.. well that's what I do every day." Can we strike a balance between the needs of law enforcement and assuaging our own fears and concerns as citizens?

For all of the high-level discussion of fourth amendment doctrine today, a couple of more concrete themes have struck me as particularly salient today:

Nicky Ozer's panel has been the most interactive panel so far. Nicky played a YouTube video of news coverage of the RFID reader that was hacked in the California state Capitol. And grad student David Molnar has just hooked up a RFID reader to his laptop and read the RFID chips in, among other things, people's Berkeley and Stanford ID cards. Fascinating!

It's break time now at CIS/STLR's Digital Privacy Symposium, so what better time for a blog post? The day has been going well so far -- we've had three of our five panels, everything is going smoothly, and the substantive discussion and comments have been absolutely great.

One thing I've really appreciated so far is the sheer diversity in viewpoints that have been presented today. We've gotten to hear, among others Mr. Downing, a DOJ Computer Crime section prosecutor; Mr. Salgado, who is counsel at Yahoo; Jim Dempsey, policy director at Center for Democracy and Technology; and David Molnar, a grad student / RFID expert from Berkeley...

The symposium drafts for "Search and Seizure in the Digital Age" are all up! Check them out at the symposium page at the Stanford Technology Law Review website, where you can participate in the online commenting session. The live event is all day Friday at the law school, and admission is free.

The drafts, in no particular order, are:

• Susan Freiwald, "A First Principles Approach to Communications Privacy" (proposing a new, four-factor "presence of electronic surveillance test" to replace Katz's "reasonable expectation of privacy" test).
• Deirdre K. Mulligan and Jack Lerner, "Taking the Long View of the 4th Amendment: Stored Records and the Sanctity of the Home" (discussing the tension between the sanctity of the home and the third-party business records doctrine in the Supreme Court's 4th Amendment jurisprudence, in light of new public utility sensor networks that monitor home energy consumption) (extended abstract).
  
• Nicole Ozer, "Rights Chipped Away: RFID and Identification Documents" (exploring privacy risks of RFID technology and possible regulatory solutions).
• Paul Ohm, "The Olmsteadian Seizure Clause" (proposing redefinition of a 4th Amendment seizure to recognize a "right to delete" in order to encompass intangible, non-rivalrous data copying) (extended abstract).
• Richard Salgado, "Anticipatory Electronic Surveillance in Anglo-American Law" (describing effect of digitization of audio and voice communications upon the surveillance law of U.S. and other countries, and suggesting an optimal approach to determining when a communication has been "intercepted" rather than merely copied during "storage") (extended abstract).

I don't know if a picture deserves its own post, but I guess I'm going to find out. Here's a group shot from last week's BT concert at the Red Devil Lounge in SF that Shireen blogged about earlier. I have been a BT fan since high school, so I was pretty psyched.

My full set of pictures from the event can be found on my Flickr page at:
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The Clinic represents Brian Transeau against claims of copyright infringement in the Vargas v. Pfizer litigation in the Southern District of New York (Case No. 04 CV 9772 (WHP)). Mr. Transeau is an accomplished musician and a pioneer of the trance music genre who is better known by his stage name, BT.