CBS News and a host of other outlets have covered my new paper with Sharon Goldberg, Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution: Warrantless Bulk Surveillance on Americans by Collecting Network Traffic Abroad. We’ll present the paper on July 18 at HotPETS [slides, pdf], right after a keynote by Bill Binney (the NSA whistleblower), and at TPRC […]
Archives for 2014
"Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution", the NSA Statement, and Our Response
July 11, 2014 by
Fair Use, Legal Databases, and Access to Litigation Inputs
July 10, 2014 by
In copyright-and-fair-use news, a significant case for the legal profession’s access to the inputs of judicial decision-making was decided last week in federal district court in New York. The case was brought against West Publishing Corp. (owner of the Westlaw database) and Reed Elsevier (owner of the LexisNexis database) by two lawyers who alleged that their […]
No silver bullet: De-identification still doesn't work
July 9, 2014 by
Paul Ohm’s 2009 article Broken Promises of Privacy spurred a debate in legal and policy circles on the appropriate response to computer science research on re-identification techniques. In this debate, the empirical research has often been misunderstood or misrepresented. A new report by Ann Cavoukian and Daniel Castro is full of such inaccuracies, despite its claims of “setting […]
On the Ethics of A/B Testing
July 8, 2014 by
The discussion triggered by Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has been enlightening and frustrating at the same time. An enlightening aspect is how it has exposed divergent views on a practice called A/B testing, in which a company provides two versions of its service to randomly-chosen groups of users, and then measures how the users react. […]
After the Facebook emotional contagion experiment: A proposal for a positive path forward
July 7, 2014 by
Now that some of the furor over the Facebook emotional contagion experiment has passed, it is time for us to decide what should happen next. The public backlash has the potential to drive a wedge between the tech industry and the social science research community. This would be a loss for everyone: tech companies, academia, […]
