Focus Areas

Architecture and Public Policy

CIS explores how changes in the architecture of computer networks affect the economic environment for innovation and competition on the Internet, and how the law should react to those changes. This work has lead us to analyze the issue of network neutrality, perhaps the Internet's most debated policy issue, which concerns Internet user's ability to...

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity practices can now affect not only our data privacy, but also our personal safety and our democracy itself. CIS scholars combine technical knowledge with legal and policy expertise to apply interdisciplinary assessments of cybersecurity issues to real-world problems.

Electronic Surveillance

Law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere continually deploy new technical tools and novel legal interpretations in order to expand their electronic surveillance capabilities, often under a veil of secrecy. With a deep bench of experts on electronic surveillance issues, CIS uses original scholarship and real-world research to uncover these...

Fourth Amendment

Law consistently lags behind technology, nowhere more so than in the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. CIS is committed to closing this gap in a variety of ways: organizing specially-focused judicial training programs; forming strategic partnerships between the litigation community and the academic world to improve...

Intermediary Liability

Whether and when communications platforms like Google, Twitter and Facebook are liable for their users’ online activities is one of the key factors that affects innovation and free speech. Most creative expression today takes place over communications networks owned by private companies. Governments around the world increasingly press intermediaries to...

Open Government

Transparency has always been essential to the rule of law and the legitimacy of our court system. But government secrecy has grown dramatically over the last few decades, especially in the realm of electronic surveillance (often court-approved) by law enforcement. CIS is a forceful advocate for greater transparency in government use of surveillance...

Privacy

Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age.  CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.