FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

Is There an iCrime Wave

The Urban Institute in Washington D.C. has issued the report: "Is There an iCrime Wave."

The recent increase in violent crime defies easy explanation, and many hypotheses have been put forward for debate. In this brief, we propose that the rise in violent offending and the explosion in the sales of iPods and other portable media devices is more than coincidental. We propose that, over the past two years, America may have experienced an iCrime wave.

See a summary here.
The report is here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Evaluation and Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards and Testing

The EVEREST: Evaluation and Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards and Testing:  Final Report has been released.  This is an Ohio study released by the Ohio Secretary of State and prepared by teams from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pennsylvania and WebWise Security.  Excerpt of conclusions:

• Insufficient Security - The systems uniformly failed to adequately address important threats against election data and processes. Central among these is a failure to adequately defend an election from insiders, to prevent virally infected software from compromising entire precincts and counties, and to ensure cast votes are appropriately protected and accurately counted.
• Improper Use or Implementation of Security Technology - A root cause of the failures present in the studied systems is the pervasive mis-application of security technology. Failure to follow standard and well-known practices for the use of cryptography, key and password management, and security hardware seriously undermine the protections provided. In several important cases, the misapplication of commonly accepted principles renders the security technology of no use whatsoever.
• Auditing - All of the systems exhibited a visible lack of trustworthy auditing capability. In all systems, the logs of election practices were commonly forgeable or erasable by the principals who they were intended to be monitoring. The impact of the lack of secure auditing is that it is difficult to know when an attack occurs, or to know how to isolate or recover from it when it is detected.
• Software Maintenance - The software maintenance practices of the studied systems are deeply flawed. This has led to fragile software in which exploitable crashes, lockups, and failures are common in normal use. Such software instability is likely to increase over time, and may lead to highly insecure and unreliable elections.

Read the Report here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

California bans mandatory RFID implants of employees

California has banned employers from mandating RFID implants in their employees. 

Read the bill here.   Read a good overview of the issue here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Court Protects Email from Secret Government Searches

Over the last 20 years, the government has routinely used the federal Stored Communications Act (SCA) to secretly obtain stored email from email service providers without a warrant.  But a ruling yesterday found that the SCA violates the Fourth Amendment.

The government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers, according to a landmark ruling in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their telephone calls -- the first circuit court ever to make that finding. 

Read the decision in Warshak v. United States

Posted by Trisha Simonds

Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp

The US Supreme Court ruled on April 30 that Microsoft cannot be forced to pay for patent infringement which has occurred when copies of Windows are made or installed on computers abroad.
    Excerpt:

It is the general rule under United States patent law that no infringement occurs when a patented product is made and sold in another country. There is an exception. Section 271(f) of the Patent Act,adopted in 1984, provides that infringement does occur when one “suppl[ies] . . . from the United States,” for “combination” abroad, apatented invention’s “components.” 35 U. S. C. §271(f)(1). This case concerns the applicability of §271(f) to computer software first sentfrom the United States to a foreign manufacturer on a master disk,or by electronic transmission, then copied by the foreign recipient for installation on computers made and sold abroad.

Read the opinion here.
See an overview of the case here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Internet Research, Uncensored

Computer scientists use social networking to help foreign scholars bypass their governments' Web filters.

From the March 23, 2007 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Read the article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Email paranoia?

The U.S. attorney general doesn’t send e-mails—and he’s not alone.  From government to business, many powerful people are choosing not to use email.  President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CEOs and others do not use email.  Is this due to a desire not to leave an electronic trail?  Are they simply too busy to spend time emailing?  While it's true that senders of email should be careful about what they send in email, it makes little sense to make a blanket decision not to use such a powerful business tool.  Think before you click is still the best course of action.

Posted by Faye Jones

The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds

What are the legal implications of virtual worlds, such as Second Life?  Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck examine the changing face of virtual reality and the associated legal issues in The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds. Some of the topics include property and creativity in virtual worlds and privacy and identity in virtual worlds.  One interesting chapter examines democracy in virtual worlds and the future of collective action. 

On page 3, Balkin and Noveck note that "Millions of people around the globe now play in these virtual or synthetic worlds.  In fact, many of the 20 to 30 million regular participants now spend more time in virtual environments than they do at their real world jobs or engaged in their real-world communities; according to one estimate, the average number of hours played is almost twenty-two per week.  People who do not vote or engage in politics in real space eagerly do so in virtual spaces, drawn by the promise of new adventures, new identities, and the possibility of building new social universes."

The State of Play authors had an associated State of Play conference in 2003 sponsored by the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.  The State of Play conference is now in its 4th year and will be held in Singapore in 2007.  It is sponsored by Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, New York Law School and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.  The organizers describe it as a "pioneering conference on virtual worlds inviting experts across disciplines to discuss the future of cyberspace and the impact of these new immersive, social online environments on education, law, politics and society." Excerpt taken from: http://www.nyls.edu/pages/5057.asp.

The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds is available in the FSU Law Library (K 3705 .V53 S73)

Posted by Marin Dell

The Power, Possibilities, and Pitfalls for Law Professor Blogs

An interesting article, Scholarship in Action: The Power, Possibilities, and Pitfalls for Law Professor Blogs by Douglas A Berman has been posted to SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

At the heart of the debate over law blogs as legal scholarship are bigger and more important (and perhaps scarier) questions about legal scholarship and the activities of law professors. First, the blog-as-scholarship debate raises fundamental questions about what exactly legal scholarship is and why legal scholarship should be considered an essential part of a law professor's vocation. And the key follow-up question is whether blogging should be part of that vocation. In this paper, I set out a few initial observations about the evolution and value of legal scholarship, and then share some thoughts on the power, possibilities, and pitfalls of law professors blogging to explain why I hope blogging will become an accepted part of a law professor's vocation.

The paper can be downloaded from here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

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Code: Version 2.0

Lawrence Lessig has updated his "minor classic" Code: Version 2.0. Here's a description from Amazon.com.

The "alarming and impassioned"* book on how the Internet is redefining constitutional law, now reissued as the first popular book revised online by its readers (*New York Times)

There's a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated-that it is, in its very essence, immune from the government's (or anyone else's) control. Code, first published in 2000, argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable; cyberspace has no "nature." It only has code-the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedom-as the original architecture of the Net did-or a place of oppressive control. Under the influence of commerce, cyberpsace is becoming a highly regulable space, where behavior is much more tightly controlled than in real space. But that's not inevitable either. We can-we must-choose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms we will guarantee. These choices are all about architecture: about what kind of code will govern cyberspace, and who will control it. In this realm, code is the most significant form of law, and it is up to lawyers, policymakers, and especially citizens to decide what values that code embodies.

Posted by Jon Lutz