For quite some time, I’ve been relying on the blog Pogo Was Right to keep up to date on privacy news.
The Best Privacy Blog
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How to Fill Out the US News Law School Rankings Form
Every year, US News compiles its law school rankings by relying heavily on reputation ratings by law professors (mainly deans and associate deans) and practitioners and judges. They are asked to assign a score (from 1 to 5) for the roughly 200 law schools on the form. A 5 is the highest score and a 1 is the lowest. While many factors that go into the US News ranking have been criticized, the reputation ratings by and large are considered one of the best components in the ranking system. But should it be?
Let’s assume a knowledgeable dean filling out the form in good faith. How is he or she to go about filling out the form?
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Data Security: When Will the Thick Skulls Learn?
The Wall Street Journal reports the theft of 3.3 million student loan records, including Social Security numbers:
Company and federal officials said they believed last week’s theft of identity data on 3.3 million people with student loans was the largest-ever breach of such information and could affect as many as 5% of all federal student-loan borrowers.
Names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other personal data on borrowers were stolen from the St. Paul, Minn., headquarters of Educational Credit Management Corp., a nonprofit guarantor of federal student loans, during the weekend of March 20-21, according to the company.
ECMC said the stolen information was on a portable media device. “It was simple, old-fashioned theft,” said ECMC spokesman Paul Kelash. “It was not a hacker incident.”
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The SeaWorld Killer Whale Death Video and the Right to Privacy
Jessica Bennett at Newsweek brought my attention to a story about the family of the killer whale trainer (Dawn Brancheau) who was killed while training the whale at SeaWorld:
Brancheau’s family announced this week that they would seek an injunction to protect the release of the death imagery, captured by SeaWorld’s surveillance cameras on Feb. 24. And though the video has not yet been publicly released, it’s presently in the hands of the Florida Orange County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the woman’s death.
According to FoxNews:
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office, who now has the video, has received several calls from sources trying to obtain copies of the video, the Orlando Sentinel reported.Once the Orange County Sheriff’s Office concludes its investigation, the material would become public under Florida law. . . .
Brancheau’s family said through a spokesman that public airing of the killing would only worsen their grief.They could seek a court injunction to stop the release, at least temporarily. The family has been consulting the lawyer who represented Dale Earnhardt’s widow in a court fight over his autopsy photos.
I believe that the Brancheau family has a good case. They want to prevent the sad events that happened to the family of Nikki Catsouras, whose gruesome accident death photos started appearing all over the Internet. In that case, the court held that the family could bring common law privacy claims against the police department for improperly leaking the photographs.
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Notable Privacy and Security Books 2009
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Credit Cards, Data Mining, and Privacy
The New York Times Magazine has an interesting article entitled What Does Your Credit Card Company Know About You? From the article:
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What Is Empathy? Obama’s Philosophy of Law and the Next Supreme Court Justice
There has been a lot of discussion on what President Obama meant when he said he wanted to choose a person who would judge with “empathy” for the U.S. Supreme Court. When articulating his decision to vote against Chief Justice John Roberts, Obama noted that 95 percent of cases would be relatively straightforward where most justices would agree, but “what matters on the Supreme Court is those 5 percent of cases that are truly difficult.” Obama further explained:
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Justice Scalia’s Dossier: Joel Reidenberg Responds
Professor Joel Reidenberg has asked me to post the following response to the story regarding his Justice Scalia dossier class assignment [link no longer available]:
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Partisan News: The Return of a Nasty Weed
The New York Times has an interesting story about the slow dwindling audience share of CNN:
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Family Privacy Rights in Death-Scene Images of the Deceased
In Newsweek, Jessica Bennett tells the tragic story about a family being harassed by the spread of death-scene images of their daughter, who was killed in an automobile accident. The photos of Nikki Catsouras were particularly gruesome — Nikki was decapitated in the crash. According to the article, soon after the crash, photos taken by the California Highway Patrol started circulating on the Internet:
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