MichaelZimmer.org

Wired details the potential impact the Democratic takeover of Congress will have on technology devopment, use and policy. Specific attention is paid to privacy and surveillance technologies: [I]t’s unlikely that Democrats — facing a presidential election in 2008 and fearful of looking soft on terrorism — will be rewriting the Patriot Act any time soon. [...]

The Volokh Conspiracy reports on a Sixth Circuit decision in a Fourth Amendment case that addresses whether querying a database triggers Fourth Amendment protection. The majority concludedthat it does not: If the government collected the data in the database in compliance with the Fourth Amendment, analyzing that data does not implicate the Fourth Amendment. I [...]

A federal judge in Detroit ruled today that the Bush administration’s eavesdropping program is illegal and unconstitutional. I’ll leave analysis of Judge Taylor’s reasoning to the experts (Jack Balkin, Orin Kerr, Dan Solove, Eugene Volokh, for starters). But I certainly agree with her quoting of Justice Warren at the conclusion of the opinion: Implicit in [...]

Registration is now open for the “Identity and Identification in a Networked World” multidisciplinary graduate student symposium, September 29-30, 2006 at the NYU School of Law. Twenty graduate students from across North America and Europe will share their exciting research on the social, cultural, philosophical, legal and technical perspectives of systems of identity, identifiability and [...]

Earlier this year, the International Association of IT Lawyers (IAITL) organized the First International Conference on Legal, Privacy and Security Issues in Information Technology in Hamburg, Germany. The conference covered a broad range of topics, such as electronic signatures, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, data protection, electronic payments, security, and so on. The papers presented provided an [...]

A group of twelve notable and diverse U.S. companies are joining forces to create a Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum to study the implications and explore support for comprehensive federal consumer privacy legislation. Google, one of the signatories, has posted the group’s statement [pdf]: Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum Statement of Support in Principle for Comprehensive Consumer [...]

My U.S. Senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is calling for the creation of a “privacy bill of rights” to protect people’s personal data. From the AP wire: ”Modern life makes many things easier and many things easier to know, and yet privacy is somehow caught in the crosshairs of these changes,” Clinton said in a speech [...]

[I am one of the organizers the following graduate student symposium to be held this fall at NYU] CALL FOR PAPERS Identity and Identification in a Networked World: A Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium When: September 29-30, 2006 Where: New York University Submission deadline: July 5, 2006 Increasingly, who we are is represented by key bits [...]

This weekend I will be attending an international conference on Access to Knowledge hosted by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. From their site: In the digital era, most multinational corporations and policymakers are of the view that the current trend characterised by increasing intellectual property rights and corporate control over knowledge best [...]

The court issued a decision Friday on Gonzales v. Google, the case involving a DOJ subpoena for Google search queries. (Dan Solove has excellent coverage here.) In short, the judge ruled partially in favor of the government, ordering Google to turn over 50,000 random URLs from its index of the web. But the judge squashed [...]