...and if a reporter called the home
number of a senior CIA official how will the FBI determine if it was
to send or receive information?
Mark Sherman of the Associated Press
broke the story yesterday:
The Justice
Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of
reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news
cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented
intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The records
obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work
and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP
office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for
the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press
gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.
Read more on AP.
There will be those who reasonably
point out that this is not the first time reporters’ records have
been acquired without their knowledge during the investigation of a
leak. But the breadth of this is raising a lot of questions and
concerns as collecting phone numbers and the metadata of calls –
even without their content – can be very problematic. It can have
a chilling
effect on a free press and make people afraid to reach out to the
press to expose government corruption. As Chris Soghoian, now with
the ACLU, has frequently pointed out, the media needs to enhance the
security protocols they use to protect sources and communications.
Will this incident lead to that kind of positive change? And as EFF
notes:
The DOJ’s
decision to dive deep into these call records also shows the growing
need to update our privacy laws to eliminate the outmoded Third Party
Doctrine and to recognize that datamining has now reached the point
where it no longer makes sense to treat calling records and other
metadata related to our communications as if they aren’t fully
protected by the Constitution.
Update: Orin Kerr sees
this as a non-story.
Scott Greenfield answers him here.
For me, the issue is not whether, but rather, should
the DOJ be able to get records that they will use to build a criminal
case without having to meet a more stringent standard than
“reasonable grounds” without any court oversight? This is not
unusual, of course, but it still troubles me.
Perhaps we should start a University
Drone Club to prepare students to use this technology.
So
This Is How It Begins: Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle
Woman
Back in October, Alexis
wrote a piece asking what rights do we have with regard to the air
above our property. Walk onto someone's lawn and you're
trespassing; fly over it in a helicopter and you're in the clear --
"the air is a public highway," the Supreme Court declared
in 1946. But what about the in-between space? Does the availability
of unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drones, aka UAVs) throw a wrench in
the old legal understandings?
Well, here's where the rubber meets the
road for this abstract line of questioning. The Capitol
Hill Seattle Blog is reporting a complaint it received from a
resident in the Miller Park neighborhood. She writes:
This afternoon, a
stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my
house near Miller Playfield. I initially mistook its noisy buzzing
for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I
looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet
away. My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our
home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to
not fly his drone near our home. The man insisted that it is legal
for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our
windows. He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits
images he viewed through a set of glasses. He purported to be doing
"research". We are extremely concerned, as he could very
easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a
peeping-tom.
The site adds, "The woman tells us
she called police but they decided not to show up when the man left."
… John Villasenor, author
of a recent Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy article
about the laws governing drones and privacy, explained to me over
email that it's difficult to analyze the legalities of the case
without more information. What kind of drone was it? How was it
flown? These questions would be instrumental to determining whether
it was operated in accordance with FAA regulations.
Should make for some interesting
contract language going forward. “Best Practice” risk analysis
would identify the data that is expected to move over any internet
connection, and secure it appropriately.
After the story broke about Bloomberg
reporters being able to access traders’ use of its terminals, law
professor James Grimmelman tweeted:
Bloomberg Law’s
privacy policy doesn’t prohibit sharing users’ searches with
Bloomberg journalists. That’s a client confidences problem.
— James
Grimmelmann (@grimmelm) May
11, 2013
It’s
not clear to me that attorneys can use Bloomberg Law without risking
disciplinary sanctions for putting client confidences at risk.
— James
Grimmelmann (@grimmelm) May
11, 2013
According to Dewey B Strategic, they
can rest
assured:
No Impact
at Bloomberg Law. According to Greg McCaffery, CEO of
Bloomberg Law, reporters have no access to the Bloomberg Law user
data. Bloomberg Law resides on a separate cloud platform, not on the
same platform as the Bloomberg terminal data. Bloomberg law doesn’t
even have the same “command” functions which the reporters used
to access customer data. He also pointed out that the Bloomberg BNA
reporters who write the Bloomberg BNA newsletters have no access to
the customer data. McCaffery stated that “Bloomberg Law takes the
privacy of its customer data very seriously. To be clear: no
journalists at Bloomberg News or BNA have ever had access to customer
research activity on Bloomberg Law.”
The fact is that
there are law firms which subscribe to Bloomberg business terminals
under separate contracts from Bloomberg Law, so presumably reporters
were also able to view the limited account activity described above.
The Bloomberg business terminals are generally used by researchers
and not law firm partners, but we now have assurance that reporters
can not access any law firm Bloomberg terminal usage.
(Related)
Catherine Dunn reports:
Bloomberg LP is
looking to repair
the ongoing fallout over a controversial breach of client data,
and the financial information company is adding a new compliance
officer to help.
Bloomberg
executive Steve Ross will now lead the company’s client data
compliance office as Bloomberg continues
to field questions over the division
between its newsgathering operation and its core business—the
$20,000-per-year data terminals employed by bankers to monitor market
conditions.
Last week, after
Bloomberg received a complaint from Goldman Sachs, the New
York Post revealed that Bloomberg News reporters were able
to view certain uses of the terminals by clients, including log-on
data. The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, also
Bloomberg clients, reportedly
contacted the company for more information on the issue.
Read more on Law.com
Lawyers who give the profession a bad
name. (no joke!)
It appears that Prenda Law, freshly
defeated,
has formed a new shell company named the "Anti-Piracy Law
Group," and has resumed sending threatening letters to supposed
porn pirates. But this time, they've expanded their threats (from a
letter
(PDF) sent to Fight Copyright Trolls):
"The list
of possible suspects includes you, members of your household, your
neighbors (if you maintain an open wi-fi connection) and anyone who
might have visited your house. In the coming days we
will contact these individuals to investigate whether they have any
knowledge of the acts described in my client’s prior letter"
Naturally, the letter also notes that
the recipient can avoid having the list of videos they supposedly
copied sent to their neighbors and family if they settle for a few
thousand bucks...
Definately not as satisfying as eating
UN polititians, but probably tastes better.
PolygamousRanchKid writes in with news
about a U.N. plan to get more
bugs in your belly.
"The U.N.
has new weapons to fight hunger, boost nutrition and reduce
pollution, and they might be crawling or flying near you right now:
edible insects. The Food and Agriculture Organization on Monday
hailed the likes of grasshoppers, ants and other members of the
insect world as an underutilized food for people, livestock and pets.
Insects are 'extremely efficient' in converting feed into edible
meat, the agency said. Most insects are likely to produce fewer
environmentally harmful greenhouse gases, and also feed on human and
food waste, compost and animal slurry, with the products being used
for agricultural feed, the agency said. 'Insects
are everywhere and they reproduce quickly,' the
agency said, adding they leave a 'low environmental footprint.' The
agency noted that its Edible Insect Program is also examining the
potential of arachnids, such as spiders and scorpions."
For my students. Remember, all work
and no play makes you an “A” student.
Play
Breakout on Google Image search
… Head on over to Google and do an
image search for "Atari
Breakout" (or just click the hyperlink).
We think this might be our new favorite
Google Easter egg. Other favorites include:
• The tilted
page when you search for "tilt" or "askew"
• The spinning
screen when you search "Do
a barrel roll"
• The mini-game
when you type and enter "Zerg
rush"
• Getting
walking directions from "The Shire" to "Mordor"
in Google Maps.
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