I review/discuss Woody Hartzog’s Unfair and Deceptive Robots over on JOTWELL:
“When the law faces a new technology, a basic question is who governs it, under what mandates, and with what rules? Technological development disrupts regulatory schemes…”
More on scary consumer robots here.
In which I discuss law and policy in the imagined future in which “invisibility cloaks” are possible with Meanwhile in the Future over at Gizmodo. Turns out they raise a lot of the same issues as masking and anonymous speech.
Yesterday, with the help of great local counsel, we filed a law professor’s amicus brief in Wikimedia v. NSA.
Brief of Amici Curiae First Amendment Legal Scholars
The ACLU is challenging the NSA’s “Upstream surveillance,” which involves copying Internet traffic (including emails, chats, and web browsing) as it crosses the fiber optic backbone of the Internet.
I filed the brief, with local counsel, (or really, attempted to file based on the court’s discretion) on behalf of First Amendment Legal Scholars, to emphasize the importance of First Amendment privacy challenges for our self-governing democracy. The brief explains that surveillance can give rise to a number of First Amendment injuries that confer standing on plaintiffs, even after Clapper v. Amnesty International. We counsel the court to avoid potential conflicts with, and unintended consequences for, First Amendment law.
Signatories include: Marc Blitz, A. Michael Froomkin, David Goldberger, James Grimmelmann, Lyrissa Lidsky, Toni Massaro, Neil Richards, and Katherine Strandburg.