This blog post is part of a continuing series examining some of the latest academic scholarship in media law and related fields! Stay tuned for future updates.

In “Body Cameras and the Path to Redeeming Privacy Law,” 96 N.C. L. Rev. 695 (2018), Woodrow Hartzog at Northeastern University School of Law argues that the intense debate over the  implications of police body cameras is a golden opportunity to “redeem” privacy law. Hartzog suggests a number of opportunities for lawmakers, scholars, and judges to alter the traditional approaches to the doctrine of privacy, including changing the “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard and creating laws relating to body camera design. From his abstract:

From a privacy perspective, the movement towards police body cameras seems ominous. The prospect of a surveillance device capturing massive amounts of data concerning people’s most vulnerable moments is daunting. These concerns are compounded by the fact that there is little consensus and few hard rules on how and for whom these systems should be built and used. But in many ways, this blank slate is a gift. Law and policy makers are not burdened by the weight of rules and technologies created in a different time for a different purpose. These surveillance and data technologies will be modern. Many of the risks posed by the systems will be novel as well. Our privacy rules must keep up.

In this Article, I argue that police body cameras are an opportunity to chart a path past privacy law’s most vexing missteps and omissions. Specifically, lawmakers should avoid falling back on the “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard. Instead, they should use body cameras to embrace more nuanced theories of privacy, such as trust and obscurity. Trust-based relationships can be used to counter the harshness of the third party doctrine. The value of obscurity reveals the misguided nature of the argument that there is “no privacy in public.”

Law and policy makers can also better protect privacy by creating rules that address how body cameras and data technologies are designed in addition to how they are used. Since body-camera systems implicate every stage of the modern data life cycle from collection to disclosure, they can serve as a useful model across industry and government. But if law and policy makers hope to show how privacy rules can be improved, they must act quickly. The path to privacy law’s redemption will stay clear for only so long.

Social media companies are ultimately for-profit corporations; regulations that may seem commonsense for First Amendment protections can often end up harming these companies’ bottom line.  Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, proposes financial penalties to counteract the “bad incentives” of social media companies in “Fixing Social Media’s Grand Bargain.” Yale Public Law Research Paper 652 (2018). From the abstract:

To regulate social media in the twenty-first century, we should focus on its political economy: the nature of digital capitalism and how we pay for the digital public sphere we have. Our digital public sphere is premised on a grand bargain: free communications services in exchange for pervasive data collection and analysis. This allows companies to sell access to end users to the companies’ advertisers and other businesses.

The political economy of digital capitalism creates perverse incentives for social media companies. It encourages companies to surveil, addict, and manipulate their end users and to strike deals with third parties who will further manipulate them.

Treating social media companies as public forums or public utilities is not the proper cure. It may actually make things worse. Even so, social media companies, whether they like it or not, have public obligations. They play important roles in organizing and curating public discussion and they have moral and professional responsibilities both to their end users and to the general public.

A reinvigorated competition law is one important way of dealing with the problems of social media. But this essay also emphasizes a second approach: new fiduciary obligations that protect end-user privacy and counteract social media companies’ bad incentives.

Mitchol Dunham at the University of Denver Law School suggests the need for an updated Stored Communications Act to accommodate “current and emerging technology” in “Arbitrary and Outdated: Reforming the Stored Communications Act.” 83 Cybersecurity, Data Privacy & eDiscovery Law and Policy eJournal (2018). From the article’s abstract:

In 2018, the Supreme Court of the United States had the opportunity to revisit the Stored Communications Act and decide the question of whether the Act could be applied extraterritorially. Instead of answering the question directly, the Court left the question for Congress to decide. Congress took this opportunity and passed the CLOUD Act, legislation that acts more as a temporary fix instead of addressing the real issue: the Stored Communications Act no longer properly accommodates modern technology. This article begins with a reading of the Stored Communications Act, describing the limits of law enforcement’s ability to obtain a warrant, including the seemingly arbitrary decisions that Congress made with respect to certain kinds of data. The article then analyzes the issue that Congress addressed through the CLOUD Act and how the paradigm shifted for extraterritorial data before turning to a different example of where the Stored Communications Act falls short: distributed storage technology. The article provides a detailed examination of how this technology works and why it does not fit within the CLOUD Act paradigm. Finally, the article concludes that the Stored Communications Act cannot be fixed through patchwork legislation; instead, the entire Act needs to be reformed to accommodate current and emerging technology. The article recognizes that although there are two diametrically opposed approaches that Congress can take, a privacy-first approach is preferable and better supported both historically and when examining society’s utilization of the internet.

Come back soon for another update!

Research graphic by Nick Youngson licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 from Alpha Stock Images.

This blog post is part of a continuing series examining some of the latest academic scholarship in media law-adjacent fields! Stay tuned for biweekly updates.

In “Legislating Against Lying in Campaigns and Elections,” 73 Okla. L. Rev. 141 (2018), Professor Joshua Sellers at Arizona State University School of Law examines the “harmful” practice of lying during campaigns, finding three specific circumstances where the Supreme Court may uphold a statutory prohibition on intentionally false political speech. From his abstract:

Political speech receives robust protection under the First Amendment, but lying in campaigns and elections is harmful to democracy. In light of the former, what can be done about the latter? In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in United States v. Alvarez, the answer to the question is uncertain. In Alvarez, six Justices supported the conclusion that intentional lies are protected under the First Amendment. The decision renders existing laws regulating intentionally false campaign and election speech extraordinarily vulnerable.

In the following Essay, I consider three circumstances in which narrowly drawn campaign and election speech restrictions are doctrinally defensible. The first is when foreign nationals, during a campaign or election, engage in intentionally false speech expressly advocating for or against the election of a candidate. The second is when intentionally false speech is used to undermine election administration. And the third is when a campaign or outside political group intentionally falsifies a mandatory disclosure filing. Aside from quite limited circumstances such as these, it is exceptionally difficult to craft novel campaign and election speech restrictions that can survive a First Amendment challenge.

Is the Internet truly the “ultimate promoter” of freedom of speech and expression? Moran Yemini, Visiting Fellow at Yale’s Information Society Project, explores the contradiction of the Internet as both vehicle of access and denier of liberty in “The New Irony of Free Speech.” Colum. Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2019). From the abstract:

In his The Irony of Free Speech, published in 1996, Professor Owen Fiss argued that the traditional understanding of freedom of speech, as a shield from interference by the state, ended up fostering a system that benefited a small number of media corporations and other private actors, while silencing the many, who did not possess any comparable expressive capacity. The conventional wisdom is that by dramatically lowering the access barriers to speech, the Internet has provided a solution to the twentieth-century problem of expressive inequality identified by Fiss and others. As this article will demonstrate, however, the digital age presents a new irony of free speech, whereby the very system of free expression that provides more expressive capacity to individuals than ever before, also systematically diminishes their liberty to speak. The popular view of the Internet as the ultimate promoter of freedom of expression is, therefore, too simplistic. In reality, the Internet, in its current state, strengthens one aspect of freedom (the capacity aspect) while weakening another (the liberty aspect). It trades liberty for capacity. The article will explore the process through which expressive capacity has become a defining element of freedom in the digital ecosystem, at the expense of liberty. The process of diminishing liberty in the digital ecosystem follows along six related dimensions explored in this article: interference from multiple sources; state-encouraged private interference; multiple modes of interference; new-media concentration; lack of anonymity; and lack of inviolability. The result of these liberty-diminishing dimensions of our current system of free expression, taken together, is that while we may be able to speak more than ever before, we are not able to speak freely.

Orin S. Kerr, Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, proposes a simple test for weighing a suspect’s Fifth Amendment right in the face of forced decryption of a phone, computer or file in “Compelled Decryption and the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination.” Tex. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2019). From the article’s abstract:

This essay considers the Fifth Amendment barrier to orders compelling a suspect to enter in a password to decrypt a locked phone, computer, or file. It argues that a simple rule should apply: An assertion of privilege should be sustained unless the government can independently show that the suspect knows the password. The act of entering in a password is testimonial, but the only implied statement is that the suspect knows the password. When the government can prove this fact independently, the assertion is a foregone conclusion and the Fifth Amendment poses no bar to the enforcement of the order. This rule is both doctrinally correct and sensible policy. It properly reflects the distribution of government power in a digital age when nearly everyone is carrying a device that comes with an extraordinarily powerful lock.

Come back soon for another update!

Research graphic by Nick Youngson licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 from Alpha Stock Images.