Month: February 2017

Internet Governance

Reach for the Sta—Appropriate Celestial Object: After the Department of Homeland Security designated state election systems as “critical infrastructure,” thereby granting these systems the protection of the federal government, the National Association of Secretaries of State recently voted to oppose the designation, as they claim that the federal government is reaching beyond its permissible scope of authority.

Privacy

Meet the Bride of Chucky: The German Federal Network Agency has ordered a doll on the market called “My Friend Cayla” to be destroyed because it violates German telecom law prohibiting “concealed transmitting devices;” the toy contains a speaker and microphone that allow children to ask questions which the doll answers based on internet searches through an unsecure Wi-Fi connection, sparking privacy, data collection, and information security concerns.

Dark Vessels, Ghost Nets, and Illegal Fish, Oh My! In an effort to save ocean life from illegal fishing, the nonprofit group SkyTruth has formed an alliance with private satellite company DigitalGlobe to track pirates across the world by using satellite data taken from the automatic identification system (AIS)—usually used to locate ships—and then analyzing heat maps to find patterns of suspicious activity over the vast ocean, which helps locate pirate ships that have turned off their AIS signals.

Information Security and Cyberthreats

You Drive Me Crazy: Due to the absence of a factory reset option, mobile applications that car owners can use to access their vehicles from their phones still allow previous owners to access their cars long after they have sold their vehicles to a new owner, in a privacy glitch discovered by an IBM researcher.

Operation BugDrop: Using Dropbox and phishing emails containing infected Microsoft Word attachments, hackers have gathered over 600 GB of data from 70 organizations—including an international organization, an engineering company, a research institute, newspaper editors, and a company that designs monitoring systems for critical infrastructure—mainly in Ukraine, a country that has already suffered two power outages caused by hackers in less than two years.

Intellectual Property

Shiver Me Timbers! Beginning this summer, Google and Bing will implement a new UK code of practice to hasten the process of taking down sites with pirated content and putting sites with legitimate content at the top of search results, making pirated content more difficult for internet users to find.

Trump™: Despite China’s Trademark Office initially rejecting Donald Trump’s registration for the “Trump” trademark back in 2006—due to China having a “first-to-file” system and the trademark already belonging to a prior Chinese registrant—in April 2016 the Review Board suddenly invalidated the former registration and transferred the trademark to the President instead, in what may be a violation of the Emoluments Clause; the President immediately applied for 49 other trademarks after this decision.

Free Expression and Censorship

A Brand New Censor: The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is using a tracking page to brand news articles that supposedly contain false information with a large red “FAKE” stamp, although the Russian government’s only explanation for why these articles from major US and UK sources, such as the New York Times and the Telegraph, are being stamped is a line on the government’s own state-run news agency reading, “This material contains data, not corresponding to the truth.”

Condoning Pedophilia? The Conservative Political Action Conference has rescinded its invitation to British public speaker and former editor of Breitbart News, Milo Yiannopoulos, after a conservative news feed recently tweeted an early-2016 podcast in which Yiannopoulos can be heard victim-blaming 13-year-old boys who are raped by older women, despite alleging that he himself was a child abuse victim.

Practice Note

A Punny Lawsuit: Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres recently won a defamation suit filed by a real estate agent after her show mocked an advertisement bearing the plaintiff’s name, Titi Pierce, and phone number, which had prompted viewers to menacingly call the plaintiff’s office to make fun of her; the court ruled that the mispronunciation of the plaintiff’s name could not support a defamation claim.

On the Lighter Side

BS-ing 101: The University of Washington is now offering a new course called “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data,” which will teach students the vital skill of detecting false information; though the 160-person class is already filled up, the public may be given access to the online syllabus and lectures.

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Joel R. Reidenberg
Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Chair and Professor of Law and Founding Academic Director, CLIP

N. Cameron Russell
Executive Director, Fordham CLIP

Editorial Fellows, CLIP
Nadia Kashem
Meghna Prasad

Internet Governance

The Spy Who Loved Me: In the UK, proposals for a new Espionage Act have been drafted without consultation with free speech organizations, even though this new law could jail and classify journalists and whistleblowers in the same category as spies for communicating, gathering, or even just obtaining classified information.

No Love for Immigrants: In response to the recent deportations of undocumented immigrants and the Muslim travel ban, the governors’ offices of all 50 states were asked about their positions on sharing immigration data with the federal government, with the results that three expressed taking active measures against it, while 47 declined to respond, gave vague responses, or expressed their support.

Privacy

You Just Keep on Pushing My Love over the Borderline: Travelers who have been stopped by border agents at American airports are reportedly being asked by Homeland Security to unlock their phones or laptops and turn over their social media passwords; despite that these agents have wider authority to search travelers at the airport than do police officers on the street, these demands are technically unlawful and requests for legal assistance are being met with great hostility.

Caught in Cupid’s Cross-Browser: Currently, websites are only able to track visitors based on a digital fingerprint embedded in a single browser, but a new mechanism called (Cross-)Browser Fingerprinting would allow websites to track visitors to a site when they use an additional browser in their device’s background; although this new technique raises privacy concerns, fingerprinting can also help enhance users’ security, for instance by alerting a user if a bank account has been logged into from a new computer.

Information Security and Cyberthreats

That PLC Needs Some TLC: At the recent RSA cybersecurity conference, a Georgia Tech PhD student demonstrated that the current landscape of industrial control systems, including water treatment, oil, and gas plants, can be easily hacked, as they are built with programmable logic controllers (PLCs)— small, specialized computers that are designed to control factory processes but that are oftentimes connected to other computers online, leaving the PLCs and therefore these industrial systems open to third party attacks.

A Date with the President: During a dinner at a private club with the Japanese Prime Minister, the President discussed classified information and allowed guests to use their phones; this lack of restriction enabled aides to direct their phones at the documents to help the President read them and a club member to take photos with the man carrying the “nuclear football,” which was later posted on Facebook.

Intellectual Property

Don’t Get All Sentimental On Me: Google has revealed that it has received website takedown requests for billions of URLs in a recent transparency report, showing a very large increase from last year; these high numbers are due mostly to a rise in piracy and websites requesting that copyright-infringing content be removed, especially in light of the recent decision of US internet service providers to vacate their piracy warning system.

A Bouquet of Images: The public can now download and freely use 375,000 high-resolution images of public domain artwork without any fear of copyright infringement under a Creative Commons Zero designation, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Free Expression and Censorship

Let’s Just Be Friends: After a Facebook user continued to receive text message notifications from Facebook despite opting out, he sued the social media platform, alleging a violation of the federal Telephone Communications Privacy Act, while Facebook’s so far rejected defense has been that the TCPA is unconstitutional as a content-based restriction on speech.

Hell Hath No Fury Like An Industry Scorned: In Mexico—Coca-Cola’s biggest consumer market—nutrition activists, policymakers, and government employees who have been campaigning to double the national soda tax in order to combat childhood obesity have received threatening anonymous text messages after their phones were infected with government spyware provided by an Israeli cyber arms dealer called the NSO Group.

Practice Note

Will You Be My Herbalentine? Although Iowa State University initially allowed NORML, a student-run marijuana advocacy group, to create a T-shirt with the school’s trademark beside the group’s name, the school subsequently disallowed the group from printing any additional shirts after receiving a “formal legislative inquiry” from an Iowa legislature GOP staffer about whether the school’s Trademark Office had approved the shirt; what followed was a lawsuit where the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals found a First Amendment violation, claiming that the university’s refusal to reprint the shirts was motivated by viewpoint discrimination.

On the Lighter Side

A Broken Heart: A man with several medical conditions was charged with arson and insurance fraud after his story of jumping through a broken window to flee his burning home while still finding time to pack and carry his belongings was found to be inconsistent with the data on his pacemaker.

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Joel R. Reidenberg
Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Chair and Professor of Law and Founding Academic Director, CLIP

N. Cameron Russell
Executive Director, Fordham CLIP

Editorial Fellows, CLIP
Nadia Kashem
Meghna Prasad

Internet Governance

Hurry Up Before You Get Sued: The New York Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against Charter Communications, parent company of Time Warner Cable, as his battle against broadband companies misleading customers intensifies; allegedly, wired internet speeds and WiFi speeds were up to 70% and 80% slower than advertised—although with a Trump-led FCC that favors these large companies, it is unclear how effective this lawsuit will be in increasing broadband companies’ transparency.

Body Cams for Entire Police Force: An agreement reached by New York City and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association will require all NYPD officers to wear body cameras by the end of 2019; however, concerns about the completeness and ability to obtain records raise questions about the effectiveness of this project, which could cost taxpayers and officers up to $250 million over 14 years.

Privacy

Scan Me, Sue You: In a milestone case defending and promoting the use of biometric data, two gamers sued video game publisher 2K claiming that 2K’s video games never informed users that face scans used to create player avatars in their likeness would be stored indefinitely and that their biometrics could be shared, but a New York federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs did not prove sufficient injury.

PornStation: In a case where gamers used the PlayStation Network to distribute child pornography—which involved Sony combing through their messages and reporting the content to law enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children after being tipped off by other gamers—a Kansas federal judge ruled that the Fourth Amendment did not protect the accused’s expectation of privacy.

Information Security and Cyberthreats

A Partnership Against Cybercrime: In an effort to combat cybercrime, Europol and the Global Cyber Alliance have signed a MoU to symbolize their agreement to increase transparency in their information exchange and to work together on international projects to strengthen cybersecurity; the partnership will work together to recommend methods of securing organizations’ networks and domains through the Internet Immunity Project for example, by encouraging organizations to adopt the DMARC email validation policy which allows organizations to authenticate email and prevent fraud.

Not a Suite Day at This Hotel: Following a rising trend in ransomware attacks throughout Europe and the US, hackers recently gained access to the electronic room key system of an Austrian luxury hotel, thereby locking guests out of their rooms until the staff paid $1,800 in the form of two Bitcoins—a digital currency favored by hackers due to the difficulty in tracing it.

Intellectual Property

A Patent Problem: As patents for routine web development processes are on the rise—such as patents for filming a yoga class, Amazon’s patent on white-background photography, and CBS Interactive’s patent for a “computer-implemented system” that posts song lyrics and allows users to annotate those lyrics—the EFF and public interest group Public Knowledge have filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to consider the obviousness standard in patent law to emphasize to patent examiners that they are able to reject common sense applications.

“G” Stands for Google: Google has requested an arbitration panel to transfer to them the domain name registration for ɢoogle.com—as opposed to Google.com—from a Russian spammer who had been using the confusing URL, spelled with a Latin “G,’ to spam Google Analytics with pro-Trump messages and bombarding users with malware, scareware, and pop-ups.

Free Expression and Censorship

Dividing the Media: Fewer than two weeks into his presidency, President Trump’s actions are already dividing media outlets including Fox News, hosted by Bill O’Reilly, and The Wall Street Journal, and causing conflict among writers and editors on their coverage perspectives—which is raising questions of fair reporting and inappropriate interference as editors insist on their writers using certain language in order to stay true to their publications’ missions.

Cyberbullying Bill Bullies Cyberbullies: A well-intentioned Texas bill against cyberbullying may in fact chill free speech and victimize unpopular groups because of its vagueness and overbreadth; the EFF argues that the bill is problematic because the term “cyberbullying” is not well-defined, students may be expelled for their behavior despite their intentions, students may not be able to communicate anonymously on the internet, and parents may also be liable when their children send harmful emails even if the parents are unaware.

Practice Note

Gorsuch a Heavy Docket: President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch may influence digital technology cases on issues such as cloud technology, authority over email stored on a foreign server, free speech rights in the digital space, and fair use of copyrighted material reproduced online.

On the Lighter Side

Online Dating for the Lazy: For only $99 a month, you can have “Audrey”—who may or may not be a bot—send messages, schedule dates, and give you feedback when you’re rejected so that you can online date without any effort of your own.

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Joel R. Reidenberg
Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Chair and Professor of Law and Founding Academic Director, CLIP

N. Cameron Russell
Executive Director, Fordham CLIP

Editorial Fellows, CLIP
Nadia Kashem
Meghna Prasad