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.
In a post on Facebook’s website, Mark Zuckerberg has announced profound changes to Facebook’s approach to privacy and, by implication, its business model. Facebook is going to change so that it becomes much more like WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned entity that allows people to communicate privately with one another. Read more about Zuckerberg’s announcement changes everything for Facebook
When Patent Office Director Michelle Lee gave that speech, Theranos appeared to be one of the most impressive companies in Silicon Valley. But later that year, the public learned that Holmes hadn’t “proven” anything. Whistleblowers told The Wall Street Journal that Theranos wasn’t even using its own devices for most of its blood testing. Holmes had apparently spent more than a decade building a company based on unrealistic or outright false claims about its revolutionary technology. Read more about Theranos: How a broken patent system sustained its decade-long deception
In Michael Cohen’s testimony Wednesday, he said President Trump “doesn’t give orders. He speaks in code. And I understand that code.” James Gagliano, a former member of the FBI’s organized crime squad, has said on Twitter that he couldn’t “begin to number” the amount of cooperating witnesses who described the orders that they got from mob bosses using similar language. This way of operating descends from the Mafia, which has its roots in Sicily. Read more about How Trump speaks like a mob boss
When Facebook started 15 years ago, it didn’t set out to adjudicate the speech rights of 2.2 billion people. Twitter never asked to decide which of the 500 million tweets posted each day are jokes and which are hate speech. YouTube’s early mission wasn’t to determine if a video shot on someone’s phone is harmless speculation, dangerous conspiracy theory, or information warfare by a foreign government. Content platforms set out to get rid of expression’s gatekeepers, not become them. Read more about Your Speech, Their Rules: Meet the People Who Guard the Internet
Last Friday, the editorial board of Bloomberg Opinion condemned Europe’s new INSTEX arrangement, a so-called Special Purpose Vehicle set up to allow European companies to engage in humanitarian trade with Iran, despite the renewal of U.S. sanctions against the Islamic Republic. This arrangement — which was set up by Germany, France and the United Kingdom — has made the United States very unhappy. Read more about Trump may be about to call Europe’s bluff on Iran. Europe isn’t bluffing.
For over seven decades, the United States has stood as the cornerstone of a rules-based global system that arose from the ashes of World War II, organizing and leading a united group of nations as they held major violators to account at international tribunals convened in Nuremberg and Tokyo. Read more about FBI's human rights investigators critical to prosecuting 'atrocity crimes'
The deluge of cyberattacks sweeping across the world has governments and companies thinking about new ways to protect their digital systems, and the corporate and state secrets stored within. For a long time, cybersecurity experts have erected firewalls to keep out unwanted traffic and set up decoy targets on their networks to distract hackers who do get in. Read more about How far should organizations be able to go to defend against cyberattacks?
Submission to Australia's Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) regarding its review of the Assistance and Access Act that had passed into law in early December 2018. Read more about Submission to PJCIS Regarding Assistance and Access Act
Order denying motions by Riana Pfefferkorn and others to unseal the docket and court's legal reasoning in a sealed case wherein the Department of Justice allegedly sought to compel Facebook to comply with a wiretap order for Facebook's end-to-end encrypted voice calling app, Messenger. Read more about Order Denying Motions to Unseal
[The below text is a short memo I presented for a workshop on a left-liberal financial foreign policy for the US last week.] Read more about Democracy and inequality as a global foreign policy agenda
