New Atrocities Prevention & Response Legislation Introduced
I posted earlier about a new bipartisan bill to advance accountability in Syria: the Syrian War Crimes Accountability Act of 2017 (current status is here). Two…
Other Writing
Trump’s No Hypocrite
U.S. President Donald Trump can be accused of having many faults, but hypocrisy is not one of them. To be sure, Trump is wildly inconsistent. His critics have f…
Thanks to Trump, Germany says it can’t rely on the United States. What does that mean?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a crowd Sunday in southern Germany that Europe can no longer rely on foreign partners. Merkel on Sunday declared a new cha…
Supreme Court Ends Texas’ Grip On Patent Cases
Today the Supreme Court issued a decision that will have a massive impact on patent troll litigation. In TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods, the court ruled that paten…
Trump’s values are abhorrent to the Federalist Society of conservative lawyers. That doesn’t stop them from helping him.
New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin describes the Federalist Society as an enormously influential network of conservative lawyers. Its executive vice president, Le…
Jeff Sessions’s war on drugs will be less consequential than many believe. Here’s why.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to reverse the policies of the Obama administration, by prosecuting more cases involving guns and drugs, and seeking more m…
The U.S. census is in trouble. This is why it’s crucial to what the nation knows about itself.
The U.S. census has recently been the subject of political argument. After contentious discussions before a congressional panel, John Thompson, the director of…
Cybercriminals have just mounted a massive worldwide attack. Here’s how NSA secrets helped them.
Computers around the world are suffering an attack from malicious software. The compromised computers have been hit by “ransomware” — software that encrypts the…
The Antidote to Authoritarianism
My first known ancestor in the Americas was an Ashanti woman called “the African.” We don’t know her name, but through records kept by slaveholders, we know she…
Today’s ODNI and Section 702 News
Today, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced that it would stop some of the surveillance it conducts on the telecommunications ba…
Comments Pertaining to Internet Users' Expression and Information Rights
I write as the Director of Intermediary Liability at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. My work there focuses closely on the “Right to Be Fo…
The three ‘B's’ of cybersecurity for small businesses
Large-scale cyberattacks with eye-watering statistics, like the breach of a billion Yahoo accounts in 2016, grab most of the headlines. But what often gets lost…