The BCLT Annual Privacy Lecture
February 28, 2013
Bancroft Hotel
Berkeley, CA
Presented by Professor Joel Reidenberg with responses by Kurt
Wimmer and Professor Anu Bradford. Moderated by Professor Paul
Schwartz.
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March 19, 2012
Bancroft Hotel
Berkeley, CA
Presented by Dr. Susan Landau with responses from Dr. Rolf H. Weber and Dr. Felix Wu. Moderated by Professor Paul Schwartz.
Designers of the first electronic telephone switches nicknamed them the "large immortal machines" because switches last decades. The 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requires that all digital-switched telephone networks be built wiretap enabled; the law took longevity of switches into account by authorizing funding to update switches in place. But by failing to analyze how threat models would change in a highly connected IP-based world, CALEA did not consider the longevity of switches prospectively. As an architected security breach, CALEA compliance is a ticking time bomb. Alleviating this was the subject of this talk.
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The 4th Annual BCLT Privacy Lecture: Standardizing Privacy Notices: Privacy Taxonomy, Privacy Nutrition Labels, and Computer-Readable Policies
February 17, 2011
Bancroft Hotel
Berkeley, CA
Presented by Dr. Lorrie Cranor with responses from Dr. Thomas Fetzer and
Dr. Jennifer Gove. Moderated by Professor Paul Schwartz.
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The 3rd Annual BCLT Privacy Lecture: Privacy - An Endless Debate?
April 5, 2010
Bancroft Hotel
Berkeley, CA
In this
lecture, Professor Spiros Simitis discussed the famous article by
William Prosser, Privacy, which appeared in the California Law
Review fifty years ago. He identified the comparable approaches in
other legal systems, and especially in German law. He also
described and analyzed the gradual replacement of traditional
privacy approaches by modern information privacy statutes, which
are termed "data protection laws." He concluded with a depiction
of the increasingly awkward situation of privacy against the
background of a constantly expanding Internet. Professor Spiros
Simitis is the father of modern European information privacy law.
Through his scholarship, policy entrepreneurship, and political
engagement, he has played a uniquely significant role in shaping
major European regulation in the area of privacy.
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March 18, 2009
Bancroft Hotel
Berkeley, CA
It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that legal systems
typically resolve dyadic relationships in which a plaintiff seeks to
gain something from a defendant. But in the many social settings the
operative arrangements involve three or more parties, and the question
is how to sort out the arrangements among them. These questions can
arise in private law, for example, when one person lends property to a
third person for safekeeping. These three cornered problems have
generated interesting legal solutions under the law of bailments when
property has been destroyed by a third person. More close to home, there
is a long line of cases that addresses the question of whether the
bailee of tangible property is in a position to claim any privilege of
his bailor when that property is sought by government investigators. The
mode of search and request may change as we move from tangible
documents to cyberspace, but the principle of analysis says the same.
Professor Epstein argued that privileges against government
intrusion into information are these same in all settings and that the
owner of property should not be required to forfeit protection when that
information is transferred to third parties.
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April 14, 2008
Bancroft Hotel
Berkeley, CA
In the first two years after 9/11, U.S. authorities detained over 5,000
foreign nationals in anti-terrorism preventive detention measures.
Today, all have been released, and not one stands convicted of a
terrorist offense. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, authorities
rounded up far fewer suspects in the wake of September 11 or their own
terrorist subway and bus bombings on July 7, 2005. At the same time,
privacy protections in the UK appear to be substantially less robust
than in the United States, as a matter of law and practice.
Closed-circuit television cameras are ubiquitous, the police have been
authorized to make suspicionless stop-and-frisks throughout London since
9/11, and wiretapping is subject to far less oversight than in the US.
We often talk about the balance between liberty and security, but this
comparison suggests that there may also be significant trade-offs
between liberties. The less a government knows about where threats lie,
the more likely it may be to conduct expansive sweeps and preventive
detention in the face of a security threat. A comparison of the UK and
US response to terrorism suggests that trade-offs between rights may
themselves be as fraught, and as significant, as the trade-offs between
rights and security.
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