PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

Fox News and Vigilante Justice Gone Bad

There have been some interesting discussions recently about people taking matters into their own hands and shaming others whom they witness committing crimes.  A while back, I wrote about the shaming of the dog poop girl, whose picture and personal information were placed on a website after she failed to clean up her dog’s poop on […]

The Washingtonienne Case and the Still-Very-Much-Alive Public Disclosure Tort

Earlier this summer, I blogged about the Washingtonienne case. Recently law professor Andrew McClurg wrote a piece for the Washington Post about the case. He writes: Cutler’s blog, written under the pseudonym Washingtonienne, was a daily diary of her sex life while working as a staffer for Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio). It recounted, entertainingly and […]

How Companies Help Phishers and Fraudsters

A friend of mine recently received in the mail a letter purporting to be from Citibank.  It contained a sheet of paper saying: “Please see the enclosed for information regarding your Citi Mastercard Customer Credit Card account ending in [last four digits] issued by Citibank USA, N.A.”  Inside the letter were two little brochures – a notice […]

Babies on the No Fly List

According to the AP [link no longer available]: Infants have been stopped from boarding planes at airports throughout the United States because their names are the same as or similar to those of possible terrorists on the government’s “no-fly list.” It sounds like a joke, but it’s not funny to parents who miss flights while scrambling […]

Councilman: Just What Does it Take for a Law to Be Vague?

To nobody’s surprise, my colleague and electronic surveillance law expert extraordinaire Orin Kerr at the VC beat everybody to the punch in announcing that the 1st Circuit reversed the panel in United States v. Councilman.  As Kerr concisely explains the panel decision in an earlier post:

National Security, Terrorism, and the Bird Flu

This great cartoon by Tom Toles (Washington Post) captures what I’ve been blogging about (here, here, and here) with regard to national security, terrorism, and privacy.  We’re spending tons of money on elaborate ways to detect terrorists, such as Secure Flight, data mining, searches of bags in NYC subways, and so on.  Meanwhile, we’re not giving sufficient […]