As many of the recent revelations of government surveillance and information gathering are revealing, government agencies such as the FBI and NSA are violating the law. Recently, the DOJ investigation into the FBI’s use of NSLs reveals many violations of law. So where are the penalties? In the latest surveillance scandal, the FBI says that it […]
According to the a DOJ investigation, the FBI has violated the law on several occasions in connection with the issuance of National Security Letters (NSLs). A NSL is a demand letter issued to a particular entity or organization to turn over various record and data pertaining to individuals. They do not require probable cause, a warrant, […]
In 2005, a series of data security breaches affected tens of millions of records of personal information. I blogged about them here, here, here, here, and here. One of the major issues with data security breaches involves what kind of notification companies should provide. The spate of data security breach announcements began in February 2005, when ChoicePoint announced its breach […]
You’ve probably seen the commericals, which run incessantly on CNN and other cable channels. A happy young man says: “I’m thinking of a number . . . ” That number is a credit score, which you can obtain at a website called FreeCreditReport.com. You probably have heard that under a new federal law, credit reporting agencies […]
Blacklists appear to be the rage these days. With the ease of storing and sharing personal information — coupled with lax privacy law restrictions on such activities — companies can increasingly create blacklists of bad customers. In this article from the Ottawa Citizen [link no longer available], hotels in Australia and Canada (and soon the United States) are […]
Chris Hoofnagle (Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic) has posted on SSRN his paper, The Denialists’ Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts. From the abstract:
Hitachi has developed a new RFID chip, one that is much smaller than existing chips. This new chip is not that much bigger than the size of a grain of sand. RFID stands for “radio frequency identification.” RFID chips are tiny computer chips embedded into products and animals (and sometimes people) to identify and track them. […]
Since nearly everybody on this blog is chiming in with posts about exams, I thought I’d do a post about exams too. This post consists of the advice handout I give to 1Ls about taking law school exams. I haven’t handed it out recently since I haven’t taught 1Ls in a while, though I think […]
The New York Times reports: The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, by far the largest group affected. The new forensic DNA sampling was authorized by Congress in […]
A study by Javelin Strategy & Research finds that identity theft declined by 11.5% in 2006: According to the study, 8.4 million adult Americans, or one in 27, learned last year that criminals committed fraud with personal data such as credit card or Social Security numbers. That’s down from 8.9 million in 2005 and 10.1 million in […]