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.
CIS in the news.
"Jen King was in a hurry to get out the door of her Bay Area home on a recent morning, and she missed a call to her cell phone because of it. The phone number that called her, she later discovered, was startling.
“It was my home phone calling me, which was not possible,” says King, who recently finished a doctorate in information science and now works at Stanford University.
"In a new paper, Riana Pfefferkorn at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS) analyzes the cybersecurity risks of this practice for all internet users — not just law enforcement’s few targeted suspects. (The ACLU’s Jennifer Granick, formerly with CIS, contributed to the report.)
"“I certainly see this banding together as a way for the U.S. government to try to exert more gravitas in the U.S. debate,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, cryptography fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
“Many of the tech companies that are in the Five Eyes' sights are U.S.-based, and it naturally exerts more pressure on those companies to have five countries (most of which presumably provide significant user bases for those companies), not just the U.S., band together to press them on encryption,” she told me in an email."
"“It just shows how much education users need to do when they switch around between half a dozen apps, trying to figure out how each one works,” says Riana Pfefferkorn, a cryptography fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. “It would be great if we had a default encryption that any service would use so you wouldn’t have to be such a detective on your own behalf.”"
""A lot of it has to do with public faith," said Jen King, director of Consumer Privacy at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. "Who can people hold accountable for protecting them? Who's going to get [tech leaders] in trouble if they get something wrong?""
"“Users are calling on online platforms to provide a moral code,” says Daphne Keller, director of the intermediary liability project at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. “But we’ll never agree on what should come down. Whatever the rules, they’ll fail.” Humans and technical filters alike, according to Keller, will continue to make “grievous errors.”"
"Many more companies felt the the impact, said Stanford Law School professor Barbara van Schewick, who has studied the issue for more than a decade.
“Employees couldn’t connect to their company’s network,” she said. “Schools couldn’t upload their payload data. Skype calls dropped.”"
"“She wouldn't outright say, ‘Yes, I want a backdoor,’ yet she voiced support for the idea of providers keeping the keys to decrypt data,” Riana Pfefferkorn, cryptography fellow at Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told me. “None of that really suggests to me that she's going to be better on ‘going dark’ or on surveillance and government access more generally.”"
"These companies “fulfill a roll that approximates a public square,” Geoffrey King, professor of media studies at UC Berkeley, told TheWrap. “It’s a really big deal to censor content or kick someone off your platform. It’s a decision they have the power to make, but it’s not one they should be undertaking lightly, to say the least.”"
"For years, Automattic’s strident response to copyright abuse earned praise from digital rights advocates. Now, this approach has effectively lumped in Mr. Pozner with the abusers. “Strictly from a copyright perspective, WordPress.com’s response is outside the norm,” said Tom Rubin, a lecturer at Stanford Law School who oversaw Microsoft’s copyright group and takedown process for 15 years.
"Richard Forno, Assistant Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and Director of the Cybersecurity Graduate Program at UMBC, however, sees it as evidence of the Trump administration's failure to take security seriously — something that Sanders' take on the situation ignores completely.
"Storing location data in violation of a user's preferences is wrong, said Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission's enforcement bureau. A researcher from Mayer's lab confirmed the AP's findings on multiple Android devices; the AP conducted its own tests on several iPhones that found the same behavior.
"Stanford Law School’s (SLS) Center for Internet and Society Junior Affiliate Scholar and outgoing Lecturer in Law Morgan Weiland has been awarded the 2018 Harry W. Stonecipher Award for Distinguished Research in Media Law and Policy for her 2017 article, “Expanding the Periphery and Threatening the Core: The Ascendant Libertarian Speech Tradition.” The article, published in the Stanford Law Review in May 2017, uncovers a new theory undergirding the First Amendment’s expansion to include commercial and corporate speech.
"Part of the problem is the way the laws are written. The federal government and most states have enacted anti-cyberstalking statutes that bar repeated use of electronic communications to frighten others. But during an online hate storm, individual members of the mob might send only one or two threatening messages each—not enough to constitute a pattern, as the laws require, says Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor and the author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace.
"If Apple wants to truly be an advocate for consumer privacy, it could take the lead in building a better system—one that lets its customers more directly control who has their data. Companies don’t go out of their way to give users deeper control over their contact lists because it’s not beneficial to the bottom line, says Jennifer King, director of consumer privacy at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. “Nobody has really reimagined the address book since we made them electronic in the ’90s,” she says.
"A nonprofit advocacy organization, EFF often files amicus briefs in cases involving tech companies. The Federal Circuit discourages amicus briefs that duplicate arguments made by the main parties, but the court’s policy of withholding access to briefs made it hard to read other case filings before the deadline to submit amicus briefs, said Daniel Nazer, the EFF attorney who asked the court to amend its policy.
""We're seeing growing interest in applying computing things like machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, etc. (think of IBM Watson stuff) to cybersecurity issues both in 'real time' and on a more strategic basis to try and identify trends and vulnerabilities before they become actual incidents," Richard Forno, assistant director of the Center for Cybersecurity and the director of the Cybersecurity Graduate Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, tells CNBC Make It."
"This is where the context of the internet starts to matter. The law assumes a narrow notion of fame—not a world where a YouTube channel’s following can rival a media company’s and the parents of a slain child can instantly become household names. “The First Amendment is a legal tool … crafted in a particular time to deal with particular media environments,” says Neil Richards, a First Amendment expert at the University of Washington Law School. “Our libel model is one that envisions establishment media and a bunch of people gossiping. It doesn’t envision social media.”"
"Giving police more flexibility to respond to allegations of threats will likely raise concerns over First Amendment rights, said Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in cyberstalking.
Citron notes Maryland already has laws prohibiting the cyberbullying of minors and said those laws sparked a debate over First Amendment rights. Attempts to expand that law failed earlier this year over concerns the changes were overly broad.
"“To my mind, if Facebook really wants to earn back trust, that is the big step that it needs to take,” said Marshall Erwin, Mozilla’s director of trust and security."