The lectures and readings listed here are subject to change, including in response to current events (i.e., major news items).
Note: A week before each class, we will provide a condensed version of every case assigned as reading. Feel free to read the full cases at the links in the syllabus, but you are only required to read the condensed versions we provide.
Tuesday, January 12
Introduction
Concepts:
Basic legal concepts (for computer science students). Basic cryptography and Internet architecture (for law students). Basics of machine learning.
Readings:
- Orin S. Kerr. How to read a legal opinion: a guide for new law students. The Green Bag, Autumn 2007. Second series. LINK.
- Steven M. Bellovin, Preetam K. Dutta, and Nathan Reitinger. Privacy and synthetic datasets. Stanford Technology Law Review, 2019. LINK, Section II.A.
- Mark Warner. Warner urges wireless carriers and technology companies to preserve evidence related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Press release, January 9, 2021. LINK.
- Brendan M. Sullivan, Gopikrishna Karthikeyan, Zuli Liu, Wouter Lode Paul Massa, and Mahima Gupta. Socioeconomic group classification based on user features. U.S. Patent 10,607,154, March 31, 2020. LINK, Abstract only.
- Video, How the Internet Works. Slides here.
Tuesday, January 19
Location Privacy
Concepts:
How location-tracking works. Third party doctrine.
Readings:
- Matt Blaze. Hearing on the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act. May 17, 2012. Testimony for the House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. LINK.
- Chaoming Song, Zehui Qu, Nicholas Blumm, and Albert-László Barabási. Limits of predictability in human mobility. Science, 327(5968):1018–1021, 2010. LINK.
- Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen, and Vincent D. Blondel. Unique in the crowd: the privacy bounds of human mobility. Scientific Reports, 2013. LINK.
- Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Natasha Singer, Michael H. Keller, and Aaron Krolik. Your apps know where you were last night, and they're not keeping it secret. New York Times, December 10, 2018. LINK.
- Jennifer Valentino-DeVries. Service meant to monitor inmates' calls could track you, too. New York Times, May 10, 2018. LINK.
- Carpenter v. United States, 8 S. Ct. 2206 (2018). Condensed, Full.
- United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983). Condensed, Full, skim.
- United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012). Condensed, Full, skim.
Tuesday, January 26
Concepts:
Data purchases. Fourth Amendment protections against collection and analysis of public data. First Amendment protections for private collection and analysis of public data. Facial recognition. Machine learning and bias.
Readings:
- Clare Garvery, Alvaro Bedoya, and Jonathan Frankle. The perpetual line-up: unregulated police face recognition in America. October 18, 2016. LINK.
- Megan Molteni. Cops are getting a new tool for family-tree sleuthing. Wired, December 16, 2020. LINK.
- Carrie Arnold. The controversial company using DNA to sketch the faces of criminals. Nature, September 9, 2020. LINK.
- Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 Ill. Comp. Stat. 14, 2008. Full.
- Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979). Condensed, Full.
- ACLU v. Clearview AI (Clearview's opening brief, pp. 16–23)
- ACLU v. Clearview AI (ACLU's opening brief, pp. 14–23)
- ACLU v. Clearview AI (ACLU's sur-reply)
Tuesday, February 02
Concepts:
Concepts of Internet of Things. Common architectures. Alternatives.
Readings:
- Matt Olsen, Bruce Schneier, and Jonathan Zittrain. Don't panic: making progress in the “Going Dark” debate. Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, February 1, 2016. LINK.
- Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001). Condensed, Full.
- Cryptographic Hash Functions
Tuesday, February 09
Commercial Web Privacy
Concepts:
How people are tracking online. Web architecture. Federal Trade Commission jurisdiction.
Readings:
- Meg Leta Jones. Cookies: a legacy of controversy. Internet Histories, 4(1):87–104, 2020. LINK, accessible from the Columbia network.
- Daniel J Solove and Woodrow Hartzog. The FTC and the new common law of privacy. Colum. L. Rev., 114:583, 2014. LINK.
- A. Barth. HTTP State Management Mechanism. RFC 6265, IETF, April 2011. LINK.
- Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., 564 U.S. 552 (2011). Condensed, Full.
- Maine's Act to Protect the Privacy of Online Customer Information, Me. Stat. tit. 35-A, §9301, 2019. Full.
- ACA Connects v. Frey (Order, pp. 1–2, 10–14)
- ACA Connects v. Frey (ACLU / EFF / CDT Amicus Brief)
- ACA Connects v. Frey (KFAI Amicus Brief)
Optional:
- Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis. The right to privacy. Harvard Law Review, 4:193, 1890. LINK.
Tuesday, February 16
Homework due:
- (Final project topic due.)
Concepts:
Free speech. Internet trolls. International issues. Machine learning and automated filtering.
Readings:
- Christopher Cox. The origins and original intent of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. University of Richmond Journal of Law and Technology blog, August 27, 2020. LINK.
- Taylor Hatmaker. Facebook Oversight Board says other social networks `welcome to join' if project succeeds. Techcrunch, February 11, 2021. LINK.
- Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. 230. Full.
- Kate Cox. Proposed sec. 230 rewrite could have wide-ranging consequences. Ars Technica, February 8, 2021. LINK.
- Daniel Solove. Restoring the CDA Section 230 to what it actually says. Privacy + Security Blog, February 4, 2021. LINK.
- Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997). Condensed, Full.
- Malwarebytes, Inc. v. Enigma Software Group USA, LLC, 592 U.S. ___, 2020 WL 6037214 (2020). Full.
- Alex Abdo. Why rely on the Fourth Amendment to do the work of the First? Yale Law Journal, 127:444, 2017. LINK.
Optional:
- Daphne Keller. Six constitutional hurdles for platform speech regulation. Center for Internet and Society (blog), January 22, 2021. LINK.
- Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Submission to Facebook Oversight Board. February 11, 2021. LINK.
- Kate Klonick. Inside the making of Facebook's Supreme Court. New Yorker, February 12, 2021. LINK.
- Jack Balkin. How to regulate (and not regulate) social media. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, March 25, 2020. LINK.
- Jed Rubenfeld. Are Facebook and Google state actors? Lawfare Blog, November 4, 2019. LINK.
Skim:
- Consumer Reports' section 230 bill tracker. 2021. LINK.
Tuesday, February 23
Privacy at the Border
Concepts:
Fourth Amendement versus border protection. Computer forensics.
Readings:
- Gina R. Bohannon. Cell phones and the border search exception: circuits split over the line between sovereignty and privacy. Maryland Law Review, 2019. LINK.
- Hillel R. Smith. Do warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border violate the Fourth Amendment? Legal Sidebar LSB10387, Congressional Research Service, December 20, 2019. LINK.
- Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014). Condensed, Full.
- Mike Masnick. Phew: EU Court Of Justice says right to be forgotten is not a global censorship tool (just an EU one). Techdirt, September 24, 2019. LINK.
- Logan Koepke, Emma Weil, Urmila Janardan, Tinuola Dada, and Harlan Yu. Mass extraction: the widespread power of U.S. law enforcement to search mobile phones. Upturn, October 2020. LINK, Section 2.
Tuesday, March 09
Concepts:
Cryptographic protocols. End-to-end encryption versus the Fourth Amendment.
Readings:
- Harold Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, Matthew Green, Peter G. Neumann, Susan Landau, Ronald L. Rivest, Jeffrey I. Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Michael Specter, and Daniel J. Weitzner. Keys under doormats: mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications. Journal of Cybersecurity, 2015. LINK.
- Carnegie Foundation. Moving the encryption policy conversation forward. September 2019. LINK.
- R. M. Needham and M. Schroeder. Using encryption for authentication in large networks of computers. Communications of the ACM, 21(12):993–999, December 1978. LINK.
- Bernstein v. Dep't of Justice, 176 F.3d 1132 (9th Cir. 1999). Condensed, Full.
- In re Order Requiring Apple, Inc. to Assist in the Execution of a Search Warrant Issued, 149 F. Supp. 3d 341 (E.D.N.Y. 2016). Condensed, Full.
Optional:
- Robert Post. Encryption source code and the first amendment. 15 Berk. Tech. L.J. 713, 2000. LINK.
Recommended:
Tuesday, March 16
Homework due:
Concepts:
Fifth Amendment. Cell phone security architecture.
Readings:
Optional:
- Maximilian Zinkus, Tushar M. Jois, and Matthew Green. Data security on mobile devices: current state of the art, open problems, and proposed solutions. White paper, January 11, 2021. LINK, skim.
Tuesday, March 23
Concepts:
Anonymous browing. Mixnets and Tor.
Readings:
- David L. Chaum. Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Commun. ACM, 24(2):84–90, 1981. doi:http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/358549.358563.
- Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson. Tor: the second-generation onion router. In Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium. August 2004. LINK.
- McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission, 514 U.S. 334 (1995). Full.
- Paul Alan Levy. Developments in Dendrite. Florida Coastal Law Review, 2012. LINK.
Tuesday, March 30
Concepts:
What is metadata. Metadata versus content. Third-party doctrine.
Readings:
- Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). Full.
- Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979). Condensed, Full.
- Steven M. Bellovin, Matt Blaze, Susan Landau, and Stephanie Pell. It's too complicated: how the Internet upends Katz, Smith, and electronic surveillance law. Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 30(1):1–101, Fall 2016. LINK, Section IV.
- Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, 18 U.S.C. 2510–2520, 1986. Full.
Tuesday, April 06
Guest lecturer: Nick Weaver, Berkeley International Computer Science Institute.
Concepts:
Bulk surveillance and how it works. Intelligence law versus criminal law.
Readings:
- National Research Council. Bulk Collection of Signals Intelligence. National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2015. LINK, executive summary.
- Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Report on the telephone records program conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. January 23, 2014. LINK, executive summary.
- Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Report on the surveillance program operated pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. July 2, 2014. LINK, executive summary.
- ACLU v. Clapper, 785 F.3d 787 (2015). Full.
Exceedingly optional:
- Office of the General Counsel. Intelligence Community Legal Reference Book. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Winter 2020. LINK.
Optional:
Tuesday, April 13
Concepts:
How cryptocurrencies work. Anonymity versus pseudonymity. “Know your customer” and anti-money laundering laws. Smart contracts versus contract law.
Readings:
- Cryptocurrency enforement framework. October 2020. LINK.
- David Chaum, Amos Fiat, and Moni Naor. Untraceable electronic cash. In Proc. of CRYPTO '88. 1988. LINK.
- Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 2009. LINK.
- Timothy B. Lee. Want to really understand how Bitcoin works? Here's a gentle primer. Ars Technica, December 15, 2017. LINK.
- Dylan Yaga, Peter Mell, Nik Roby, and Karen Scarfone. Blockchain technology overview. NISTIR 8202, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), October 2018. LINK.
- Dan Goodin. Almost $500,000 in Ethereum Classic coin stolen by forking its blockchain. Ars Technica, January 08, 2019. LINK.
- aseeb Qureshi. A hacker stole $31m of ether — how it happened, and what it means for ethereum. freeCodeCamp, July 20, 2017. LINK.
- Stan Schroeder. Wallet bug freezes more than $150 million worth of Ethereum. Mashable, November 8, 2017. LINK.
- Fitz Tepper. People have spent over $1M buying virtual cats on the Ethereum blockchain. TechCrunch, December 3, 2017. LINK.
- United States v. Gratkowski, 964 F.3d 307 (2020). Full.
Optional:
- Kyle Orland. Ars Technica's non-fungible guide to NFTs. Ars Technica, March 29, 2021. LINK.
Thursday, April 15
Homework due:
- (Final Project: Written)
Tuesday, April 20
Class Presentation of the Final Project (19:10-22:00)
