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.
Bari Weiss, an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, created a stir this week with a long article on a group that calls itself the “Intellectual Dark Web.” The coinage referred to a loose collective of intellectuals and media personalities who believe they are “locked out” of mainstream media, in Weiss’s words, and who are building their own ways to communicate with readers.
End-to-end encryption is a powerful tool for security and safety. It lets patients talk to their doctors in complete confidence. It helps journalists communicate with sources without governments listening in. It gives citizens in repressive regimes a lifeline to human rights advocates. And by end-to-end encrypting sensitive information, a cyber attack aimed at revealing private conversations would be far less likely to succeed.
The Senate has recently confirmed Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State, after Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) dropped his objections and several Democrats indicated that they would support the nominee. The confirmation process for Pompeo’s replacement as head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is not likely to go so smoothly.
This Comment was filed response to the Canadian Office of the Privacy Commissioner's Draft Online Reputation Position Paper. As summarized here, the Comment discusses the shortcomings of PIPEDA and data protection statutes generally as sources of law regulating online information and expression.
The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) at the UN has just concluded a second round of meetings on lethal autonomous weapons systems in Geneva, under the auspices of what is known as a Group of Governmental Experts. Both the urgency and significance of the discussions in that forum have been heightened by the rising concerns over artificial intelligence (AI) arms races and the increasing use of digital technologies to subvert democratic processes.
On April 16, the Commerce Department denied export privileges to the Chinese phone and telecoms giant ZTE for seven years. This ban means that ZTE will no longer be able to buy technology from American suppliers, including chips and other critical components central to its products.
In his congressional testimony, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed to understand the importance of protecting both the security and privacy of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users.
A New Hampshire state court has dismissed a defamation suit filed by a patent owner unhappy that it had been called a “patent troll.” The court ruled [PDF] that the phrase “patent troll” and other rhetorical characterizations are not the type of factual statements that can be the basis of a defamation claim.
We live in an e-commerce utopia. I can call out orders and my demands are satisfied through an automated, seamless transaction. I just have to ask Alexa, or Siri, or one of the other digital assistants developed by Silicon Valley firms, who await the commands and manage the affairs of their human bosses.