Category «United States Law»

Limiting Human Rights during Pandemics

Cassandra Emmons, Cassandra Emmons a postdoctoral fellow with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs’ t Harvard Univrsity, discusses how COVID-19 has proven that public health emergencies are not equally recognized in either international law or national constitutions; some international treaties permit “limiting” rights in the name of public health rather than requiring derogation, and nationally some governments authorize emergency measures in practice without ever doing so in name. These parallel processes and conceptual gaps create space for governments to restrict individuals’ rights with little to no international accountability during pandemics.

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Comparative/Foreign Law, Government Resources, Healthcare, Legal Research

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 25, 2021

Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Landlords Use Secret Algorithms to Screen Potential Tenants. Find Out What They’ve Said About You; Even the NSA Agrees: Targeted Ads Are Terrifying; Massive Troll Farms Revealed to Be Operating on Facebook; and Ninth Circuit Says Warrantless Search of Google Files Automatically Reported to Police.

Subjects: AI, Competitive Intelligence, Congress, Criminal Law, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Financial System, Privacy, Search Engines, Social Media

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 18, 2021

Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Apple’s Plan to Scan Your Phone Raises the Stakes on a Key Question: Can You Trust Big Tech?; ‘Breach of trust’: Police using QR check-in data to solve crimes; Agencies may want to establish a national strategy for contact-tracing apps; and Americans have little trust in online security: AP-NORC poll.

Subjects: Big Data, Blockchain, Computer Security, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Data Mining, Gadgets/Gizmos, Healthcare, Legal Research, Privacy

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 12, 2021

Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: 8 Easy Ways to Stay Anonymous Online; Education Department Updates Rules and Criminal Penalties for Accessing Agency Data; ProtonMail Shares Activist’s IP Address With Authorities Despite Its “No Log” Claims; and As flood alerts lit up phones, did ‘warning fatigue’ set in?

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Email Security, Encryption, International Legal Research, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 4, 2021

Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Expired Driver’s Licenses Open Lane for Cybercriminals; Tips for Victims of Unemployment Benefit Fraud; Fraud Alert: Malicious QR Codes Now Used by Online Scammers; and FBI-CISA Advisory on Ransomware Awareness for Holidays and Weekends.

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Privacy, Social Media

Data privacy laws in the US protect profit but prevent sharing data for public good – people want the opposite

Cason Schmit, Brian N. Larson and Hye-Chung Kum are faculty at the school of public health and the law school at Texas A&M University with expertise in health information regulation, data science and online contracts. U.S. data protection laws often widely permit using data for profit but are more restrictive of socially beneficial uses. They wanted to ask a simple question: Do U.S. privacy laws actually protect data in the ways that Americans want? Using a national survey, we found that the public’s preferences are inconsistent with the restrictions imposed by U.S. privacy laws.

Subjects: AI, Big Data, Digital Archives, Health, Healthcare, Information Management, KM, Privacy

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 28, 2021

Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: How Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Trolls Turned Goodreads Into Many Authors’ Worst Nightmare; Facial Recognition Technology: Current and Planned Uses by Federal Agencies; FBI sends its first-ever alert about a ‘ransomware affiliate’; and Who Will The Cybersecurity Bells Toll For?

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Food & Drug Law, Health, Healthcare, Legal Research, Medical Research, Privacy

IPCC climate report: Profound changes are underway in Earth’s oceans and ice – a lead author explains what the warnings mean

Humans are unequivocally warming the planet, and that’s triggering rapid changes in the atmosphere, oceans and polar regions, and increasing extreme weather around the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns in a new report. The IPCC released the first part of its much anticipated Sixth Assessment Report on Aug. 9, 2021. In it, 234 scientists from around the globe summarized the current climate research on how the Earth is changing as temperatures rise and what those changes will mean for the future. This is a conversation with climate scientist Robert Kopp, a lead author of the chapter on Earth’s oceans, ice and sea level rise, about the profound changes underway.

Subjects: Environmental Law

Robots are coming for the lawyers – which may be bad for tomorrow’s attorneys but great for anyone in need of cheap legal assistance

Imagine what a lawyer does on a given day: researching cases, drafting briefs, advising clients. While technology has been nibbling around the edges of the legal profession for some time, it’s hard to imagine those complex tasks being done by a robot. And it is those complicated, personalized tasks that have led technologists to include lawyers in a broader category of jobs that are considered pretty safe from a future of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. As Professors Elizabeth C. Tippett and Charlotte Alexander discovered in a recent research collaboration to analyze legal briefs using a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, lawyers’ jobs are a lot less safe than we thought. It turns out that you don’t need to completely automate a job to fundamentally change it. All you need to do is automate part of it.

Subjects: AI, Courts & Technology, KM, Legal Marketing