Saturday, September 21, 2013

MIRLN --- 1-21 September 2013 (v16.13)

MIRLN --- 1-21 September 2013 (v16.13) --- by Vince Polley and KnowConnect PLLC (supplemented by related Tweets: @vpolley #mirln)

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NEWS | LOOKING BACK | NOTES

A win for opinion: Sixth Circuit tackles website top-ten lists (Harvard's Digital Media Law Project, 29 Aug 2013) - As our friends at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic have reported , on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a decision that placing a particular hotel at the top of an online list of the "Dirtiest Hotels in America" was protected under the First Amendment and Article I, Section 19 of the of Tennessee Constitution as a statement of opinion. The Sixth Circuit's decision is a triumph for consumer ratings websites and their ability to build upon the data submitted by their users. However, the Court's articulation of the doctrine of opinion arguably underestimates the potential value of that same information. The case, Seaton v. TripAdvisor LLC , arose after online travel website TripAdvisor published its "2011 Dirtiest Hotels" list based upon hotel cleanliness ratings provided by the site's users. #1 on the list was the Grand Resort Hotel and Convention Center in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, owned by plaintiff Kenneth Seaton. Seaton sued, claiming that TripAdvisor's rankings were false because they did not accurately reflect the underlying user data. TripAdvisor in turn argued that the list constituted a statement of opinion that could not be proven true or false, because the rankings on the list and the concept of the "dirtiest" hotel were inherently subjective. A federal district court in Tennessee dismissed Seaton's claims, and Seaton appealed. Effectively, Seaton was challenging the methodology by which TripAdvisor reached its conclusions based on data collected from its users. And while TripAdvisor's top-ten list was a more fanciful form of research than that undertaken in scholarly circles (well, mostly ), TripAdvisor's analysis of crowdsourced data to reach systemic conclusions echoes important techniques for academic research and data journalism . Allowing debates over methodology to devolve into defamation claims could substantially chill the advancement of research on important but sensitive issues. In fact, the law provides substantial protection for the publication of conclusions based upon gathered data, under the doctrine of opinion.

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At Library of Congress, changes are afoot in technology as well as in physical space (Washington Post, 29 August 2013) - The Library of Congress no longer needs the computer room that visitors once used to search its electronic card catalogue. These days the entire library has a wireless Internet connection, so workers this summer put a collection of old microfilm machines in that room instead. Meanwhile, the library's old-school physical catalogues, the kind filled with carefully penned index cards, have long since been relegated to cool basement hallways where schoolchildren marvel at their obscurity. "I told them, 'Before Google, this is what we used to do,' " said Fenella France, the library's chief of preservation research. "They had never seen [card catalogues] before. Then I was teaching children another day, and I said, 'Let's go clockwise,' and they just looked at me. I said, 'Oh, no. Didn't you learn analog?'" As libraries adapt to an increasingly networked and digital world, leading institutions are rethinking their use of physical spaces as well. At the Library of Congress, that means consolidating multiple reading rooms and making the experience of in-person researching more like the kind of one-stop shop we've come to expect online, a controversial plan that's still being debated. At the same time, planners are trying to make online presentations feel more intuitive by designing collections of photos and navigation tools on the library's Web site so that they operate like Facebook, Amazon.com and other popular sites. Digital and physical changes play off one another. For the first time in 40 years, a small team is also reinventing the way the library catalogues re­sources, developing a system that's designed to become the new global standard. Elsewhere in the library, staffers are creating the institution's first holistic online strategy of the Internet age and restructuring its stable of Web sites.

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UK Banks' resilience to cyber crime to be tested by government (The Telegraph, 31 August 2013) - A joint team at the Treasury and the Bank of England is currently benchmarking lenders on the basis of the ability of their IT systems to defend themselves against concerted attempts to steal customer information or funds. They are also looking at "denial of service" attacks. Treasury sources said the so-called "cyber stress tests" were becoming as important as the more high-profile capital strength exercises regularly conducted by regulators, with banks considered to have weak defences being ordered to strengthen their security. The current benchmarking is being compiled from information gathered during an industry-wide cyber attack exercise conducted last year. A follow-up drill is planned for later this year. Andrew Haldane, director of financial stability at the Bank of England, warned in June that cyber attacks were now a greater risk to the banking system than the eurozone debt crisis. Mr Haldane told MPs that he had recently met five of Britain's biggest banks and that four had said that cyber attacks were had become the greatest threat to their businesses. He added that the fifth bank had recently upgraded cyber attacks as one of its key risks.

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Yelp gets another anti-SLAPP victory in lawsuit over consumer review (Eric Goldman, 2 Sept 2013) - The plaintiff, who is also a lawyer (and surely you recall how I feel about lawyer-plaintiffs), has repeatedly written about this case online focusing on different facts, but I'm only going to address what the court says. The court says Bernath sued Yelp for a review written by a user, Tabitha J. In a very brief opinion, the court says Yelp is protected by Oregon's anti-SLAPP law because (1) the review concerns a matter of public interest, and (2) Bernath can't win against Yelp due to 47 USC 230. This should mean that Bernath will have to write a check to Yelp for its legal defense.

Yelp has won anti-SLAPP rulings before (see, e.g., Demetriades v. Yelp ), so this case doesn't really break any new ground. Still, the case offers another data point of how 47 USC 230 and anti-SLAPP laws mutually reinforce each other in the efforts to curb unmeritorious lawsuits over third party content. Bernath v. Tabitha J. , 1305-06167 (Ore. Cir. Ct. Aug. 26, 2013)

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Paper book owners can soon pick up e-book versions at heavy discount (ArsTechnica, 3 Sept 2013) - Amazon announced a new program Tuesday that will allow owners of physical books to buy their Kindle counterparts at significantly discounted rates. The system, called Kindle Matchbook, lets users pick up the e-book version for $2.99 or less. The only snag is that the book must have been bought from Amazon. The publisher must choose to "enroll" a book in the program; once it's there, it will cost paper book owners $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or will be free, depending on the publisher's whim. If the publisher isn't on board, you'll still have to pay full price for the e-book counterpart. Per the press release, the paper book order must be present in the buyer's Amazon purchase history in order for the book to be eligible for the Matchbook program. The launch date for Matchbook will be sometime in October.

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U. of Wisconsin-Madison lets students pick names (InsideHigherEd, 4 Sept 2013) - The University of Wisconsin at Madison is this year for the first time letting all students pick the first and middle names they wish to appear on most university records, such as directories, The Wisconsin State Journal reported. Students will have the option of blocking their legal name from appearing in registration lists and other places. The policy is designed to make the university more inclusive, letting students who prefer not to use names for any number of reasons avoid them, officials said. (Legal names will still be used on transcripts, payroll records and for financial aid.) The LGBT Campus Center encouraged the development of the new policy. Some transgender students prefer not to use their legal names, which may be associated with a gender that doesn't reflect their identity.

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NSA foils much encryption (NYT, 5 Sept 2013) - The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents. The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show. [ Polley: this is big news, and hints at much, much more. E.g., " Vast amounts of encrypted data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable " and " [The NSA] covertly introduced weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world ".]

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The NSA is sharing data with Israel. Before filtering out Americans' information. (Washington Post, 11 Sept 2013) - In the months since Edward Snowden's classified document leaks, the Obama administration has repeatedly assured Americans that the National Security Agency does not intentionally collect information about U.S. citizens. The government has also said that when data are collected "inadvertently," because an American is in contact with a foreign target, the data are protected by strict "minimization procedures" that prevent the information from being misused. New documents from Snowden reported by the Guardian on Wednesday appear to contradict those claims. They reveal that the NSA has been sharing raw intelligence information with the Israeli government without first filtering it for data on the communications of American citizens. Israel receives data that "includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content." * * * What's also noteworthy is that the memo allows Israeli intelligence to retain data they identify as belonging to Americans for up to a year. The United States merely requests that they consult the NSA's special liaison adviser at the time they discover such data. But "any data that is either to or from an official of the US government " is supposed to be destroyed as soon as it is recognized.

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NSA spying jumps the shark in new YouTube video (GigaOM, 20 Sept 2013) - Revelations about America's spy programs, in which the NSA vacuums up troves of phone and social media data, have led to outrage, despair or simply fatigue. But now someone has introduced a bit of fun into the parade of grim news about security hacks and secret courts . The Shorts Show Productions ("Brooklyn's Worst Sketch Comedy") has put out an NSA-themed video set to the tune of summer hit "Blurred Lines." It features a President Obama character urging everyone to log-on and an NSA agent crooning reassurance about "Murica, we're the good guys!" Oh, and some prancing terrorists and an Edward Snowden cameo. Video here . [ Polley : very funny. Also note that "Blurred Lines" also can be read as "Blur Red Lines".]

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What happens in social media stays in social media (Steptoe, 5 Sept 2013) - Nevada has joined the club of states that bar employers from requiring or requesting that current or prospective employees provide access to their personal social media accounts. Twelve other states (Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and, most recently, New Jersey) have placed similar restrictions on employers. Comparable legislation is pending in at least 35 other states. Importantly, Nevada's A.B. 181 does not affect an employer's right to comply with "any rule of a self-regulatory organization." Securities firms affected by rules promulgated by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) have sought exemptions from social media laws to ensure that they can comply with FINRA'S rules, which may affect social media accounts. The Nevada law takes effect on October 1, 2013.

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Did you murder someone? Don't tell your lawyer over email (The Verge, 6 Sept 2013) - When the Snowden leaks first revealed the depths of the NSA's spying capabilities, most eyes were on Gmail and Outlook.com. But for lawyers, there was a bigger worry: Dropbox. The profession has embraced the tool wholeheartedly as a way to share confidential documents among teams, but when documents showed Dropbox as an upcoming PRISM partner, the privacy reckoning was immediate. As one lawyer wrote, "With an unfettered pipe to all of the major data houses, lawyers have to question how safe their client data is." Dropbox has repeatedly denied that it participates in backend data-sharing, but not everyone is convinced - and the problem is only getting bigger as the tools of the modern office move online. Confidential communications between lawyers and clients is a crucial feature of American law, but attorney-client privilege could be waived if the information is shared with a third party. The biggest example is Gmail, which has already put forth its data-mining in court as a form of third-party sharing . Usually if you share an email with someone who isn't your client, it's enough to waive attorney-client privilege - so why do email-scanning services like Gmail get a pass? Gmail is officially off-limits for confidential medical information , since doctors can't sign individual contracts with Google as required by the HIPAA privacy law. The usual answer for lawyers, laid out in a 2008 ethics opinion by the New York State Bar Association, is that providers are "agents" of the email owner, akin to a paralegal working in a lawyers office. (A lawyer can use a human translator for private testimony, for instance, as long as there's a reasonable effort to ensure the translator maintains confidentiality.) But as UNC law professor Anne Klinefelter points out, Google has changed their privacy policy seven times since then, and it's unclear whether the opinion still holds. The norms are changing fast, and it's dangerous to assume they're always in line with a lawyer's ethical obligations. "Bar associations are really struggling with, what is reasonable?" Klinefelter says. "Should lawyers have to use Tor?" Providers are trying to fight back against that scenario, but they can only do so much. Box.com recently unveiled a doctor-targeted storage service with certifications to prove it's compliant with HIPAA and doctor-patient confidentiality, and the company has made similar moves to protect legal and corporate confidences. But there's one necessary hole, and it's the same one that makes PRISM possible. If services get a subpoena or a FISA warrant, they're bound by law to comply - and after the leaks, we know those warrants are far from rare. Even if the result isn't admissible in court, it could be leaked to a different agency, and if a client is likely to be the target of a federal investigation, protecting them means keeping the documents safe. As a result, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals who rely on confidentiality are left to balance privacy with convenience, with their professional ethics at stake. Right now, the default is to pretend for legal purposes that cloud tools provide better privacy than they really do, writing off Gmail's data scanners and the NSA's backdoors as minor details. But bar associations seem to be embracing that default without the attention or expertise necessary to really engage with the ever-changing limitations of the cloud. "We need something that's not a one-off, that's an ongoing best practices source that everyone can look to," Klinefelter says. "These things are a moving target, and you have to revisit them all the time."

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Yelp sues law firm for posting fake reviews (TechDirt, 9 Sept 2013) - Fake reviews online are something many people have just come to expect. Just recently we discussed an example of where it was obvious there were a ton of fake reviews on Amazon.com. Many sites that include user reviews work pretty hard to scrub the obviously fake ones, but it appears Yelp has taken that to a new level, deciding to sue a law firm for posting fake reviews . It should be noted that this same law firm, McMillan Group, previously had sued Yelp, claiming that it had been "coerced" into buying ads to get favorable reviews, so you could argue that there's a reason this particular firm was targeted. But, either way, it raises some fairly interesting legal questions. Specifically, Yelp is arguing that when McMillan employees created fake accounts in order to post bogus positive reviews for their own firm, they violated the terms of service of the site. Thankfully, (unlike Craigslist ), Yelp doesn't try to argue that violating the TOS is a CFAA violation. Instead, the lawsuit focuses on some specific charges including breach of contract, intentional interference with contractual relations, unfair competition and false advertising. The filing details, rather comprehensively, how over a period of a few months, it appears that employees at the firm created accounts and immediately posted positive reviews of the firm, sometimes claiming things that are unlikely to be true.

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Should GCs be on the board? GCs say yes (Corporate Counsel, 10 Sept 2013) - Most general counsel believe that having a lawyer sit on a company's board of directors improves corporate governance and encourages less corporate risk-taking, according to a new study. "The General Counsel Excellence Report 2013" [PDF] , released Monday, also found that one in five general counsel surveyed aspired to sit on the boards of companies, either their own or others'. Of those responding, only nine percent actually sit on their company's board. The survey found the GC's leadership role often increases during emergencies. If a crisis occurred, the general counsel was in charge in 16 percent of companies polled, while the CEO was in charge in 52 percent. However, the general counsel was very involved (37 percent) or involved (53 percent) in helping with crisis management planning. Some 60 percent said the GC works with the company's communications department all the time. But on "strategic" communications, such as during a crisis, that number jumps to 83 percent.

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10 yrs later, DHS still plagued with cybersecurity, critical infrastructure problems (ComputerWorld, 11 Sept 2013) - Today marks 12 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks; it's been a decade since 22 government agencies were combined into the Department of Homeland Security in response to those attacks. "DHS has spent more than $35 billion on homeland security grants, but cannot measure whether we are safer from terrorist attacks," according to Republican Senator Tom Coburn. This morning, the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing about "The Department of Homeland Security at 10 Years: Examining Challenges and Achievements and Addressing Emerging Threats." Ultimately, this is the agency responsible for our critical infrastructure that is often critically vulnerable to cyber attacks. Although many DHS areas were discussed during the senate panel, I thought you might be interested in tidibts from four testimonies about DHS and cybersecurity.

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Court rejects Google appeal in Street View lawsuit (Computerworld, 11 Sept 2013) - A U.S. appeals court upheld a district court decision that Google's collection of data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks under its Street View program is not exempt from federal wiretap laws. Google's data collection does not qualify for the exemption [because] data transmitted over a Wi-Fi network is not an electronic communication that is readily accessible to the general public, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Tuesday, giving a go-ahead to a privacy lawsuit against Google. Wi-Fi transmissions are not readily accessible to the general public because most of the general public lacks the expertise to intercept and decode payload data transmitted over a Wi-Fi network, Judge Jay S. Bybee wrote in the opinion. "Even if it is commonplace for members of the general public to connect to a neighbor's unencrypted Wi-Fi network, members of the general public do not typically mistakenly intercept, store, and decode data transmitted by other devices on the network." [ Polley : seems wrong to me; just because most members of the general public don't have short-wave radios doesn't mean that people to listen to them are breaking US law. See also Google's WiFi sniffing might break wiretap law, appeals court rules (Wired, 10 Sept 2013) - * * * Ironically, the Federal Communications Commission last year cleared Google of wrongdoing in connection to it secretly intercepting Americans' data on unencrypted Wi-Fi routers. The commission concluded that no wiretapping laws were violated when the search giant's Street View mapping cars eavesdropped on open Wi-Fi networks across America. The FCC said that, between 2008 and 2010, "Google's Street View cars collected names, addresses, telephone numbers, URL's, passwords, e-mail, text messages, medical records, video and audio files, and other information from internet users in the United States."]

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Fifth Circuit finds economic loss doctrine doesn't bar breach suit (Steptoe, 12 Sept 2013) - The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has held, in Lone Star National Bank, N.A., et al., v. Heartland Payment Systems Inc., that banks that suffered economic losses as a result of a data breach may bring a negligence claim, at least under New Jersey's tort law. In many states, the economic loss doctrine usually precludes negligence claims where the only loss alleged is economic rather than some personal injury or harm to property, absent some "special relationship" between the parties. Accordingly, many courts dealing with data breach cases have held that this doctrine bars plaintiffs' negligence claims. The Fifth Circuit found that New Jersey's version of the economic loss doctrine, at least, allows negligence cases even where the losses are purely economic, as long as one or more factors are present. This decision is especially significant for financial institutions that want to recover costs inflicted by data breaches of third-party processors with which the financial institutions have no contractual relationships.

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Cybersecurity: 36 questions every director should ask (Sheppard Mullin, 12 Sept 2013) - Cyber security, data loss, hacking and schemes to steal personal information and assets electronically are all over the news daily. Companies are the primary targets of these actions since they accumulate information, store it and use it for their internal efforts, for their clients and in interacting with the world outside. In an effort to prevent problems before they arise, and to be in the best possible posture should their company become a victim of these damaging events, below is a list of questions that general counsel, senior management and corporate directors should be asking of themselves and their companies * * *

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Can your iPhone thumbprint be used against you? (12 Sept 2013) - Unlocking your iPhone with a fingerprint is convenient. But it could backfire if you end up in trouble with the law, warn some privacy experts. Courts have given mixed messages about whether Americans are protected from being forced to divulge passwords or decrypt information for law enforcement officials. Civil liberties advocates argue defendants shouldn't have to unlock their own computers for the cops. The logic: Under the Fifth Amendment, Police can't force you to self-incriminate by testifying, or divulging something in your mind. It's unclear if that same protection applies if the password is your fingerprint. "A fingerprint is entitled to less constitutional protection than a password known in your mind," said Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "If police arrest you and ask you for a password, you could refuse and they'd be hard pressed to force you to divulge the password." Of course, police already collect fingerprints after booking a suspect. And the Supreme Court has also held that police don't need a search warrant to collect fingerprints. It isn't hard to imagine police also forcing a suspect to put his thumb on his iPhone to take a look inside, said Brian Hayden Pascal, a research fellow at the University of California Hastings Law School's Institute for Innovation Law.

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Dropbox takes a peek at files (InfoWorld, 13 Sept 2013) - Dropbox takes a peek at some kinds of uploaded files. That's normal, the Web storage service says. The disclosure comes after a test of the service found that several ".doc" files were opened after being uploaded to Dropbox. Dropbox's behavior was detected using HoneyDocs, a new Web-based service that creates a log showing when and where a document was opened, according to a blog post at WNC InfoSec. The experiment involved uploading to Dropbox ".zip" HoneyDocs folders with embedded ".doc" files. HoneyDocs lets users set up a "sting," or a notification that is sent by SMS or email when a file has been viewed. Where the file has been viewed from is plotted on a map. The callback, or as HoneyDocs calls it a "buzz," is an HTTP Get request with a unique identifiers assigned to a sting. The data on when and where the file has been opened is sent over SSL port 443, according to HoneyDocs. WNC InfoSec wrote the first buzz came back within 10 minutes after a file was uploaded with the IP address of an Amazon EC2 instance in Seattle. Dropbox uses Amazon's cloud infrastructure. Of the submitted files, only ".doc" files had been opened, WNC Infosec wrote. HoneyDocs also pulled information on the type of application which accessed the document, which in this case was the open-source productivity suite LibreOffice. Despite the strange behavior, the explanation is straightforward. What WNC InfoSec picked up on using HoneyDocs is automated backend processing that Dropbox does on certain kinds of files. Dropbox allows users to see previews of some kinds of documents, included ".doc" ones, but it must build a preview of those documents, according to a Dropbox spokeswoman. To do that, the document must be opened. According to Dropbox's website, users can open Word, PowerPoint, PDF and text files from directly within their browser, which saves them from needing certain software programs installed on their computer. Still, the behavior may make some people nervous. Security experts generally recommend that for stronger privacy, users should encrypt documents before transmitting those files to Web-based storage providers.

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Enterprises find some valuable (and kinda awesome) uses for employees' smartphones (GigaOM, 15 Sept 2013) - Most business uses of BYOD are really really boring. Employees demanded - and companies embraced - Bring Your Own Device policies because workers wanted to use their iPhones instead of a company BlackBerry. But it turns out employees do the exact same work functions on their own devices that they used to do on their BlackBerrys: email, calendar and contacts. Only now are enterprises realizing some of the incredible ways they can benefit from the smartphones in their workers' pockets. Why the lag in innovation? A couple of reasons. First, BYOD happened very quickly. The concept was rarely discussed before 2011. But, by the end of this year, 83 percent of companies will have a formal policy allowing BYOD. Second, enterprises have struggled to find talented in-house mobile dev teams, slowing down the actual app development process. Third, the ROI case was harder to make for internal tools - how much value is a corporation going to get by developing or buying an app for 500 employees? But that attitude is changing, primarily because enterprises are beginning to identify valuable new ways to benefit from employees' iPhones and Android handsets. The following cases are illustrative:

But these apps are just the tip of the iceberg.

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BYOD: bring your own (legal) difficulties (Corporate Counsel, 20 Sept 2013) - Accessing company data via a mobile device like a smartphone or tablet has become the norm for employees around the globe. However, "bring your own device " (BYOD) policies pose numerous legal pitfalls, according to "Avoiding BYOD Legal Issues," a new whitepaper released by Route1, a digital security and identity management solutions company. The report focuses on the perils of combining personal and enterprise data on employee devices-though convenient and possibly cost-effective, it's a practice that can be a major problem because most device software has trouble telling the difference between personal and professional information. The complications over BYOD are exacerbated, according to Route1, by a lack of clear legal standards and regulations around the practice, and by the possibility that accessing an employee's data might expose information about genetic, health, or disability information, which is protected by federal law. Michael McGuire, shareholder and chief information security officer at labor and employment firm Littler Mendelson , which has authored its own report on BYOD [PDF] , told CorpCounsel.com that there is a lack of case law in the BYOD area, but there have been plenty of complaints by employees over privacy and employer access. McGuire noted that not all companies have sufficient policy in place to cover BYOD issues-a conclusion supported by Corporate Counsel 's "2013 In-House Tech Survey "-and those that do should focus on training their IT departments on what do to do in the event of a data wipe or when an employee leaves the organization.

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DC lawyer pursues suit to unmask authors who changed her Wikipedia page (ABA Journal, 16 Sept 2013) - A Washington, D.C., lawyer is pursuing a defamation lawsuit that seeks to unmask two anonymous writers who edited her Wikipedia page. Lawyer Susan Burke claims the Wikipedia editors wrongly linked her civil suit against Blackwater Inc. with a judge's decision to dismiss a prosecution against the company's security guards, the National Law Journal (sub. req.) reports. The two editors are identified only as Zujua and CapBasics359. Zujua fought Burke's Wikipedia subpoena and is appealing a lower court's refusal to quash. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals has postponed a Sept. 19 hearing to get additional briefing from the parties, according to The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times. Zujua argues the appeal is allowed under Washington's law barring strategic lawsuits against public participation. Additional briefing will be on the merits of the judge's refusal to quash the subpoena. The identity of CapBasics359 is still unknown, although Burke's lawyers know he logged in at a Starbucks in California, the NLJ says. Zujua is represented by Christopher Hajec of The Center for Individual Rights. "We view this as having the effect of chilling the free speech rights of other Wikipedia editors who will hesitate to edit on matters of public concern for fear of being sued if they make a mistake," he told the NLJ.

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Finding lawyers on Twitter: two directories fall out of date but a third is very cool (Robert Ambrogi, 18 Sept 2013) - * * * [ Polley : skipping intro about the out-of-date ones] * * * Meanwhile, a different type of directory for finding lawyers on Twitter - as well as for gaining insight into your own network of followers - is Twtrland . Unlike the directories above, Twtrland is not exclusively a lawyer directory, but it does let you explore Twitter by various categories of skills and expertise, with "legal" as one of those categories. Search "legal" to get a list of the tweeters who Twtrland ranks as most influential. Refine your search by location to find the most influential legal tweeters within, say, the U.K. or New York. Refine your search further by gender or by adding skills. Twtrland is also unique in its profiles of Twitter users. Its developers say that they created it in order to help people decide whether to follow someone. To do this, it analyzes a person's Twitter activity to create a visual depiction of the person's "social footprint." * * * You can drill down through some of these stats to find more granular information about a person's (or your own) followers. For example, I can see who among my followers is from the U.K., and then further refine my U.K. followers by skills or other facets.

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Risk monitoring a key component of social media strategies (InsideCounsel, 18 Sept 2013) - One of the most famous commercials of the 1970s explained to us that, if we told two friends about Faberge Organics shampoo, they would tell two friends and so on and so on. It indicated the power of social interaction, demonstrating on-screen how, after a short while, hundreds and then thousands of people would know about the benefits of wheat germ, oil and honey shampoo. In the era of social media, the adage has changed. "You tweet to all your followers, and they'll tweet to all of their followers and so on and so on." Then, rather than spreading your message by powers of two, consumers suddenly have the ability to inform tens or hundreds of thousands of people within seconds. They can easily spread the positive word about your delightful products… or they can propagate bad news through the same channels. One company that learned this lesson the hard way is Chobani, a popular Greek yogurt brand - and the favorite of spokesperson John Stamos. On Aug. 26, Chobani issued a "voluntary withdrawal" of its products from store shelves, after learning of a problem with mold in its yogurt. Once upon a time, that sort of event would have flown under the radar. Stores would have removed the product and perhaps employees would have "told two friends" about it. But instead, Chobani learned a tough lesson about how social media empowers consumers to disseminate their opinions, and how companies must keep this risk in mind when developing social media strategies. At first, the negative social media posts came in at a trickle, but momentum grew toward Labor Day weekend. The Wall Street Journal reported that one tweet, on Aug. 30, came from a supermarket worker who had seen a Chobani recall. At the time, the company had only issued the voluntary withdrawal - an important distinction when dealing with the Food and Drug Administration but one that is lost on the average person. It is possible that this negative conversation (Chobani tried to engage the tweeter, perhaps making matters worse) spurred the company to issue the formal recall. Either way, Chobani soon became inundated with social media comments and phone calls, eventually training staff to help with the response effort. As the first major crisis encountered by the eight year old company, it was caught unaware, lacking risk managers to monitor social media feeds and properly trained agents who could deal with the negative response. It's a hard lesson to learn - harder than any that John Stamos doled out as Uncle Jesse on Full House - but it is a story that can help other companies in the future. Businesses, no matter what the size, should keep a close eye on social media outlets, assessing the risks and rewards and making business savvy decisions. After all, when people ask you to explain social media messages, it's not okay to say "It's all Greek to me."

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Court gives a victory to Pandora over licensing streaming music (NYT, 18 Sept 2013) - Pandora Media won a battle in its continuing war with the music industry over royalties when a federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which represents thousands of members, cannot prevent Pandora from licensing all the songs in its catalog. The ruling , by Judge Denise L. Cote of United States District Court in Manhattan, is a blow to music publishers, who have tried to get the best royalty rates for digital music by limiting the extent that performing rights societies like Ascap and Broadcast Music Incorporated represent their songs. The ruling could also hurt the societies themselves if they are perceived as preventing the publishers from getting higher rates. Two years ago, the industry's biggest publishers began withdrawing digital rights to their music from Ascap and BMI, forcing companies like Pandora to negotiate directly for a license to stream the music. Sony/ATV, the world's largest publisher, has said it received a 25 percent higher rate by licensing its songs to Pandora directly. Pandora argued in a motion for summary judgment that allowing publishers to withdraw their digital rights violated Ascap's longtime consent decree, which says that the organization must license its songs to any service that asks. The judge agreed, saying that Ascap must make all the songs in its catalog available to Pandora through 2015, when its current licensing terms with Internet radio provider expire. If Ascap licenses a song for some purposes, the judge ruled, it must for others - like streaming - as well.

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LOOKING BACK - MIRLN TEN YEARS AGO

(note: link-rot has affected about 50% of these original URLs)

Microsoft Offers Free E-Book Downloads (CNET, 2 July 2003) -- In a move aimed at bolstering the use of its Microsoft Reader program, the software giant announced on Wednesday that it would offer free downloads of e-book bestsellers over a 20-week period. Although Microsoft has launched similar promotions in the past to boost users' familiarity with Reader and attempt to snag market share from Adobe's omnipresent Acrobat software, the new promotion is the largest in scope and duration that the company has offered, Microsoft eReading group product manager Cliff Guren said. "Customers are satisfied with the reading experience once they engage with it, but we wanted to build awareness of e-books and Microsoft Reader. We want to expose more people to this," Guren said. Microsoft Reader debuted in August 2000 and has since received 6 million downloads. The company released Microsoft Reader 2.0 a year ago, along with an online catalog of e-book titles available for the software. As part of the five-month promotion, users can download three e-books a week from Microsoft's Web site via a Pocket PC, a Tablet PC, a laptop or a desktop. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, and Fear Itself by Walter Mosley are among the titles offered.

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World Drowning in Oceans Of Data (BBC, 31 Oct 2003) -- Growing net, computer and phone use is driving a huge rise in the amount of information people generate and use. US researchers estimate that every year 800MB of information is produced for every person on the planet. Their study found that information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical disks has doubled since 1999. Paper is still proving popular though. The amount of information stored in books, journals and other documents has grown 43% in three years. The researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, last carried out a study of how much information was being generated and where it was kept three years ago, based on data from 1999. The most recent study has revealed that every year since then the amount of information generated has grown about 30%. But these percentages belie the vast mountains of information involved. Most new information is captured on computer hard disks Study authors Prof Peter Lyman and colleagues found that in 2002 alone about five exabytes of new information was generated by the worlds print, film, magnetic and optical storage systems. By comparison the US Library of Congress print collection, comprising 19 million books and 56 million manuscripts, equates to about 10 terabytes of information. It would take 500,000 Libraries of Congress to equal five exabytes. But even this figure is dwarfed by the gargantuan amount of information flowing through electronic channels such as the telephone, radio, television and internet. In 2002 the study estimates that 18 exabytes of new information flowed through these channels. The vast majority of this, 98%, was in the form of person-to-person phone calls. It also found that most of the information transmitted via radio and TV is not new information, the vast majority are repeats. Of the 320 million hours of radio shows only 70 million hours are actually original shows. On TV only 31 million hours of the total 123 million hours of broadcast programmes count as new information. Prof Lyman said he was surprised that paper was still proving popular as a storage medium but put its resilience down to the fact that a lot of the information generated on computer is printed out. One area that is gradually losing out to digital media is film. Prof Lyman said the increasing popularity of digital cameras and cameras was driving people away from the older format. In the years since the last study, the amount of images captured on film has declined by 9%. The study also revealed an image of the average amount of time people spend with different sorts of media. It showed that the average American adult spends 16.17 hours on the phone a month, listens to 90 hours of radio and watches 131 hours of TV. The 53% of the US population that uses the net spends more than 25 hours online a month at home and more than 74 hours on the net at work. The researchers point out that this means we are accessing information media 46% of the time.

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NOTES

MIRLN (Misc. IT Related Legal News) is a free e-newsletter published every three weeks by Vince Polley at KnowConnect PLLC. You can subscribe to the MIRLN distribution list by sending email to Vince Polley ( mailto:vpolley@knowconnect.com?subject=MIRLN ) with the word "MIRLN" in the subject line. Unsubscribe by sending email to Vince with the words "MIRLN REMOVAL" in the subject line.

Recent MIRLN issues are archived at www.knowconnect.com/mirln . Get supplemental information through Twitter: http://twitter.com/vpolley #mirln.

SOURCES (inter alia):

1. The Filter, a publication of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

2. InsideHigherEd - http://www.insidehighered.com/

3. SANS Newsbites, sans@sans.org

4. NewsScan and Innovation, http://www.newsscan.com

5. Aon's Technology & Professional Risks Newsletter

6. Crypto-Gram, http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html

7. McGuire Wood's Technology & Business Articles of Note

8. Steptoe & Johnson's E-Commerce Law Week

9. Eric Goldman's Technology and Marketing Law Blog, http://blog.ericgoldman.org/

10. The Benton Foundation's Communications Headlines

11. Readers' submissions, and the editor's discoveries

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

PRIVACY NOTICE: Addresses and other personal information provided during the subscription process will be kept confidential, and will not be used for any other purpose. top

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Saturday, August 31, 2013

MIRLN --- 11-31 August 2013 (v16.12)

MIRLN --- 11-31 August 2013 (v16.12) --- by Vince Polley and KnowConnect PLLC (supplemented by related Tweets: @vpolley #mirln)

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NEWS | PODCASTS | RESOURCES | LOOKING BACK | NOTES

Live threat intelligence impact report 2013 (Ponemon Institute, 26 July 2013) - This comprehensive study of 708 respondents from 378 enterprises reveals the financial damage that slow, outdated and insufficient threat intelligence is inflicting on global enterprises and how live threat intelligence provides the ability to better defend against compromises, breaches and exploits. Today's headlines and a barrage of marketing content lead many enterprise IT security and risk professionals to conclude that common cybercriminal tactics such as phishing attacks, malware and stolen credentials are responsible for the majority of breaches and compromises taking place. While enterprises certainly need to defend against these attack vectors, this research reveals the connection between thwarting compromises and the need to have access to the most immediate threat intelligence available, or what is becoming known as "live threat intelligence." The research also shows that enterprises experiencing the highest number of compromises and breaches are reliant on slow, outdated and insufficient intelligence. The findings in this report lead to a number of conclusions that will help security and risk professionals reduce the risk of breaches and compromises within the enterprises they are responsible for defending. These conclusions highlight the value of immediate threat intelligence, the current state of threat intelligence, the importance of live threat intelligence and the propensity enterprises have to invest in live intelligence solutions. To access click here . [ Polley : Fascinating! An informative slide presentation summarizing the study is here . Surprising how many companies know they are targets, and what a large percentage of attacks come from within the US (71%). Only 31% of companies have cyber risk insurance. Also, "Legal and compliance requirements" are the primary driver for IT security spending. Press coverage: Despite praising benefits of data breach cyber insurance, most companies remain uninsured (Market Watch, 7 August 2013)]

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DEA and NSA team up to share intelligence, leading to secret use of surveillance in ordinary investigations (EFF, 6 August 2013) - As the NSA scoops up phone records and other forms of electronic evidence while investigating national security and terrorism leads, they turn over "tips" to a division of the Drug Enforcement Agency ("DEA") known as the Special Operations Division ("SOD"). FISA surveillance was originally supposed to be used only in certain specific, authorized national security investigations, but information sharing rules implemented after 9/11 allows the NSA to hand over information to traditional domestic law-enforcement agencies, without any connection to terrorism or national security investigations. But instead of being truthful with criminal defendants, judges, and even prosecutors about where the information came from, DEA agents are reportedly obscuring the source of these tips. For example, a law enforcement agent could receive a tip from SOD-which SOD, in turn, got from the NSA-to look for a specific car at a certain place. But instead of relying solely on that tip, the agent would be instructed to find his or her own reason to stop and search the car. Agents are directed to keep SOD under wraps and not mention it in "investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony," according to Reuters . UPDATE: Add the IRS to the list of federal agencies obtaining information from NSA surveillance. Reuters reports that the IRS got intelligence tips from DEA's secret unit (SOD) and were also told to cover up the source of that information by coming up with their own independent leads to recreate the information obtained from SOD. So that makes two levels of deception: SOD hiding the fact it got intelligence from the NSA and the IRS hiding the fact it got information from SOD. Even worse, there's a suggestion that the Justice Department (DOJ) "closely guards the information provided by SOD with strict oversight," shedding doubt into the effectiveness of DOJ earlier announced efforts to investigate the program. [ Polley : Jennifer Granick has a passionate editorial about this here: NSA, DEA, IRS lie about fact that Americans are routinely spied on by our government: time for a special prosecutor (Forbes, 14 August 2013)]

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51% of U.S. adults bank online (Pew, 7 August 2013) - Fifty-one percent of U.S. adults, or 61% of internet users, bank online. Thirty-two percent of U.S. adults, or 35% of cell phone owners, bank using their mobile phones. These findings are based on nationally representative surveys by the Pew Research Center designed to track an activity that is often held up as a proxy for consumer trust in online transactions and as an example of how one industry has enabled data to flow among different institutions. Both types of digital banking are on the rise. In 2010, 46% of U.S. adults, or 58% of internet users, said they bank online. In 2011, 18% of cell phone owners said they have used their phone to check their balance or transact business with a bank.

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Legal ethicists are playing catch-up to create social media guidelines for lawyers, judges (ABA Journal, 10 August 2013) - Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn-there are now many social media platforms which lawyers are urged to use to build business and retain clients. But they also present many opportunities to run afoul of legal ethics rules. In recent years, the states have been putting out a steady stream of ethics opinions and court rulings on how professional conduct rules for lawyers apply to social media. And a year ago, the ABA House of Delegates adopted several revisions to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to give lawyers further guidance on how to adapt communications technology to how they interact with clients and prospective clients. But panelists at the ABA Annual Meeting program "Things My Ethics Professor Didn't Tell Me: Top Ethical Pitfalls for the Social Media Age" expressed concern that all this effort still may not be keeping up with changes in communications technology. The revisions to the Model Rules, which serve as the basis for binding ethics standards in every state-except California (which uses a different structure for its rules)-were adopted by the House at the 2012 ABA Annual Meeting in Chicago at the recommendation of the Commission on Ethics 20/20, which was created in 2009 to study the impact of technology and globalization on lawyer ethics and regulation. "The Ethics 20/20 Commission did an extraordinary job," said panelist Juliet M. Moringiello , a law professor at Widener University in Harrisburg, Pa., to the audience of the ABA Business Law Section's event in San Francisco. "But so much electronic communications is running so far ahead of ethics rules, and the commission may still have been focused on what was rather than what will be." Another area that is receiving attention is the use of social media by judges. The general consensus developing is that judges should not seek to "friend" lawyers on social media sites who are likely to appear before them, but the specific application often is fuzzy. A 2011 opinion from Oklahoma, for instance, says judges may include lawyers as friends on networks like LinkedIn or Facebook "as long as they [judges] don't otherwise use the networks improperly." Opinions on the issue also urge judges to avoid the "appearance of impropriety" in their contacts with lawyers. But opinions, including ABA Formal Opinion 462, issued earlier this year by the Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, acknowledge that applying the standard can be difficult.

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Law firms can't describe 'specialties' on LinkedIn, New York ethics opinion says (ABA Journal, 16 August 2013) - Law firms may not describe their services in a section of LinkedIn devoted to specialties, according to a New York ethics opinion. New York ethics rules allow lawyers, but not law firms, to state that they have been certified as a specialist, according to the June 26 opinion (PDF) by the New York State Bar Association's Committee on Professional Ethics. As a result, only appropriately certified lawyers may list specialties, provided that they comply with disclosure requirements. The ABA/BNA Lawyers' Manual on Professional Conduct has a summary. According to the ethics opinion, a law firm may identify areas of law practice. "But to list those areas under a heading of 'Specialties,' would constitute a claim that the lawyer or law firm 'is a specialist or specializes in a particular field of law,' " the opinion said.

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Former DHS deputy secretary launches cybersecurity council (Hillicon Valley, 12 August 2013) - The former deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department announced the launch of a cybersecurity nonprofit organization on Monday that's focused on the dual goals of preserving an open Internet and encouraging the adoption of best practices to secure computer systems against cyberattacks. Jane Holl Lute will serve as the president and chief executive officer of the new nonprofit organization, called the Council on Cybersecurity. Lute stepped down from her role as the second-highest official at the Department of Homeland Security this spring, and her name has been floated as a possible candidate to succeed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. In remarks at a cybersecurity conference in Washington, Lute said the council would be focused on spreading the adoption of cybersecurity best practices and equipping the cyber workforce with the skills needed to tackle the evolving challenges that lay ahead in protecting cyberspace. As part of its efforts, the council will encourage the adoption of the critical security controls developed by SANS, as well as work on updating and improving them to better secure the public and private sectors from cyberattacks. [ Polley : SANS describes Lute's goals as " * * * to provide a minimum standard of due care that will allow top executives of corporations and governments to measure their organizations' cybersecurity defenses and skills."]

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The NSA is commandeering the Internet (Bruce Schneier in The Atlantic, 12 August 2013) - It turns out that the NSA's domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we've learned, fight and lose . Others cooperate , either out of patriotism or because they believe it's easier that way. I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight. Do you remember those old spy movies, when the higher ups in government decide that the mission is more important than the spy's life? It's going to be the same way with you. You might think that your friendly relationship with the government means that they're going to protect you, but they won't. The NSA doesn't care about you or your customers, and will burn you the moment it's convenient to do so. We're already starting to see that. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are pleading with the government to allow them to explain details of what information they provided in response to National Security Letters and other government demands. They've lost the trust of their customers, and explaining what they do -- and don't do -- is how to get it back. The government has refused; they don't care. It will be the same with you. There are lots more high-tech companies who have cooperated with the government. Most of those company names are somewhere in the thousands of documents that Edward Snowden took with him, and sooner or later they'll be released to the public. The NSA probably told you that your cooperation would forever remain secret, but they're sloppy. They'll put your company name on presentations delivered to thousands of people: government employees, contractors, probably even foreign nationals. If Snowden doesn't have a copy, the next whistleblower will. This is why you have to fight. When it becomes public that the NSA has been hoovering up all of your users' communications and personal files, what's going to save you in the eyes of those users is whether or not you fought. Fighting will cost you money in the short term, but capitulating will cost you more in the long term. * * * You, an executive in one of those companies, can fight. You'll probably lose, but you need to take the stand. And you might win. It's time we called the government's actions what they really are: commandeering. Commandeering is a practice we're used to in wartime, where commercial ships are taken for military use, or production lines are converted to military production. But now it's happening in peacetime. Vast swaths of the Internet are being commandeered to support this surveillance state. If this is happening to your company, do what you can to isolate the actions. Do you have employees with security clearances who can't tell you what they're doing? Cut off all automatic lines of communication with them, and make sure that only specific, required, authorized acts are being taken on behalf of government. Only then can you look your customers and the public in the face and say that you don't know what is going on -- that your company has been commandeered. [ Polley : More by Bruce here; the part about Qwest is particularly interesting: More on the NSA Commandeering the Internet (Bruce Schneier, 30 August 2013)]

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How the NSA leaks could affect the US cloud computing industry (CS Monitor, 26 August 2013) - A recent report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimates that the United States ' multibillion-dollar US cloud computing industry stands to lose anywhere from $22 to $35 billion over the next three years because of the NSA revelations. "If European cloud customers cannot trust the United States government, then maybe they won't trust US cloud providers either," said European Commissioner for Digital Affairs Neelie Kroes in an interview with the Guardian in July. "If I am right, there are multibillion-euro consequences for American companies. If I were an American cloud provider, I would be quite frustrated with my government right now." Industry shifts since the NSA leaks in early June support Mr. Kroes' argument. Amazon Web Services, widely acknowledged as the global market leader in cloud storage, cut some of its prices by 80 percent in July to remain competitive. The writing on the walls seems clear: The NSA leaks will hurt US cloud companies. But to peg an industry shift to June 2013 would overlook a larger trend that has been taking place in the industry since 2001. [ Polley : see also More PRISM fallout: Indian government may ban Gmail use (GigaOM, 30 August 2013)]

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Susan Landau on Snowden's revelations (Lawfare, 15 August 2013) - Susan Landau has a new piece at Computing Now called Making Sense from Snowden: What's Significant in the NSA Surveillance Revelations : Did Snowden cause irreparable harm, or did he reveal facts that should be publicly examined? What are the facts, anyhow? This article seeks to put the Snowden revelations in context, explaining what's new, why it matters, and what might happen next.

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NSA often broke rules on privacy, audit shows (NYT, 16 August 2013) - The National Security Agency violated privacy rules protecting the communications of Americans and others on domestic soil 2,776 times over a one-year period, according to an internal audit leaked by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden and made public on Thursday night. The violations, according to the May 2012 audit, stemmed largely from operator and system errors like "inadequate or insufficient research" when selecting wiretap targets. The largest number of episodes - 1,904 - appeared to be "roamers," in which a foreigner whose cellphone was being wiretapped without a warrant came to the United States, where individual warrants are required. A spike in such problems in a single quarter, the report said, could be because of Chinese citizens visiting friends and family for the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday. "Roamer incidents are largely unpreventable, even with good target awareness and traffic review, since target travel activities are often unannounced and not easily predicted," the report says. The report and several other documents leaked by Mr. Snowden were published by The Washington Post . They shed new light on the intrusions into Americans' privacy that N.S.A. surveillance can entail, and how the agency handles violations of its rules. Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union said that while some of the compliance violations were more troubling than others, the sheer number of them was "jaw-dropping." Another newly disclosed document included instructions for how N.S.A. analysts should record their rationales for eavesdropping under the FISA Amendments Act, or F.A.A., which allows wiretapping without warrants on domestic networks if the target is a noncitizen abroad. The document said analysts should keep descriptions of why the people they are targeting merit wiretapping to "one short sentence" and avoid details like their names and supporting information. A brief article in an internal N.S.A. newsletter offered hints about a known but little-understood episode in which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found in 2011 that the N.S.A. had violated the Fourth Amendment . The newsletter said the court issued an 80-page ruling on Oct. 3, 2011, finding that something the N.S.A. was collecting involving "Multiple Communications Transactions" on data flowing through fiber-optic networks on domestic soil was "deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds."

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40 maps that will help you make sense of the world (Twisted Sifter, 13 August 2013) - If you're a visual learner like myself, then you know maps, charts and infographics can really help bring data and information to life. Maps can make a point resonate with readers and this collection aims to do just that. Hopefully some of these maps will surprise you and you'll learn something new. A few are important to know, some interpret and display data in a beautiful or creative way, and a few may even make you chuckle or shake your head. [ Polley : I especially like the maps "The Only 22 Countries Britain has NOT Invaded", and the dynamic "Global Internet Usage Based on Time of Day".]

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Topics for law-blogging: 125+ suggestions (Prof. Walter Effross, 14 August 2013) - Below are various suggested topics-some of which overlap, and some of which might be combined-for law-blogging (although they could also be refined into topics for individual law review articles or other publications). They are drawn primarily from the domains of corporate governance, e-commerce, intellectual property, payment systems, and bankruptcy law, and of course are not meant to constitute an exhaustive list even for these areas.

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America's most profitable company per employee makes your phone work-and it's not Apple (Quartz, 14 April 2013) - You'd be forgiven for not recognizing the name InterDigital , despite the fact that it has been around since 1972 and developed many of the technologies that are critical to our increasingly mobile, wireless world. As a result, per employee, InterDigital is the most profitable company in the US, with a net income of $937,255 per worker, according to Bloomberg's just-released visual compendium of data . And the only thing InterDigital produces is designs for new technology-and the occasional lawsuit . But whatever you do, don't call InterDigital a patent troll-CEO William Merritt hates that term . And it's admittedly not a fair label for InterDigital, in contrast to firms that merely buy up patents in order to then sue other people over them. Like ARM, the Cambridge, UK-based company that designs the chips that are in practically every mobile device on the planet, InterDigital does not manufacture anything itself. Yet the company employs more than 200 engineers who have collectively helped InterDigital amass a trove of patents that could be worth billions. InterDigital also creates working prototypes of all of its technologies, in order to demonstrate them to industry partners like Alcatel-Lucent , who later incorporate them into their products. [ Polley : surprising.]

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Google: Gmail users shouldn't expect email privacy (The Guardian, 14 August 2013) - Gmail users have no "reasonable expectation" that their emails are confidential, Google has said in a court filing . Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's ( NSA ) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals. "Google has finally admitted they don't respect privacy ," said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's privacy project director. "People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents' privacy, don't use Gmail." Google set out its case last month in an attempt to dismiss a class action lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of breaking wire tap laws when it scans emails in order to target ads to Gmail users. That suit, filed in May, claims Google "unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people's private email messages." It quotes Eric Schmidt , Google's executive chairman: "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it." According to Google: "Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient's assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient's ECS [electronic communications service] provider in the course of delivery."

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Communications privacy 2.0 (MLPB, 16 August 2013) - Orin S. Kerr, George Washington University Law School, is publishing The Next Generation Communications Privacy Act in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Here is the abstract: In 1986, Congress enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to regulate government access to Internet communications and records. ECPA is widely seen as outdated, and ECPA reform is now on the Congressional agenda. At the same time, existing reform proposals retain the structure of the 1986 Act and merely tinker with a few small aspects of the statute. This Article offers a thought experiment about what might happen if Congress repealed ECPA and enacted a new privacy statute to replace it. The new statute would look quite different from ECPA because overlooked changes in Internet technology have dramatically altered the assumptions on which the 1986 Act was based. ECPA was designed for a network world with high storage costs and only local network access. Its design reflects the privacy threats of such a network, including high privacy protection for real-time wiretapping, little protection for non-content records, and no attention to particularity or jurisdiction. Today's Internet reverses all of these assumptions. Storage costs have plummeted, leading to a reality of almost total storage. Even United States-based services now serve a predominantly foreign customer base. A new statute would need to account for these changes. The Article contends that a next generation privacy act should contain four features. First, it should impose the same requirement on access to all contents. Second, it should impose particularity requirements on the scope of disclosed metadata. Third, it should impose minimization rules on all accessed content. And fourth, it should impose a two-part territoriality regime with a mandatory rule structure for United States-based users and a permissive regime for users located abroad.

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Prison computer 'glitch' blamed for opening cell doors in maximum-security wing (Wired, 16 August 2013) - Florida prison officials say a computer "glitch" may be to blame for opening all of the doors at a maximum security wing simultaneously, setting prisoners free and allowing gang members to pursue a rival with weapons. But a surveillance video released this week (see above) suggests that the doors may have been opened intentionally - either by a staff member or remotely by someone else inside or outside the prison who triggered a "group release" button in the computerized system. The video raises the possibility that some prisoners knew in advance that the doors were going to open. It's the second time in two months that all of the doors in the wing opened at once, officials say, raising questions about whether the first incident was a trial-run to see how long it would take guards to respond.

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Virtual firms on the decline - why? (MyShingle, 16 August 2013) - According to the 2013 ABA Legal Technology Survey, virtual law practices are on the decline , reports Bob Ambrogi at his Law Sites Blog . The decrease isn't particularly significant; the number of lawyers who describe their practice as virtual declined from 7 to 5 percent between 2012 and 2013, while the number of lawyers providing unbundled legal services (an offering common to many virtual practices) declined from a high of 44 percent in 2012 to 25 percent, in line with 2011. What accounts for the decline in virtual law practices? I think that several factors are at play * * *

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State police recorded license plates at political events (The Daily Progress, 18 August 2013) - Virginia State Police recorded the license plates of every vehicle arriving from Virginia to attend President Barack Obama's first inauguration in Washington in 2009, as well as those at campaign rallies three months earlier in Leesburg for then-candidate Obama and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. The U.S. Secret Service requested that state police use one of its automated license plate readers at the entrance to the Pentagon to capture and store the plate images as an extra level of security for the inauguration, which was attended by an estimated 1.8 million people. The same was requested for the political rallies. The state police license plate readers have been used statewide since 2006, mostly by on-the-road troopers to detect stolen cars and fugitives. But the data collected were also used to solve other crimes after the fact by being able to track a person to a specific place at a certain time. Up until a February legal opinion issued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on the collection and dissemination of license plate reader data, state police beginning in 2010 had stored the images of roughly 8 million license plates - some for as long as three years - on a server in the department's data center at state police headquarters in Chesterfield County, said state police Sgt. Robert Alessi, the department's statewide coordinator for the program. But the department says all of it was purged in early March, after Cuccinelli advised that collecting and storing such data in a "passive manner" that is not directly related to a criminal investigation would be in violation of the state's Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act.

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The photocopier: a vulnerability hidden in plain sight (HealthITech Law, 18 August 2013) - The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ("HHS") announced last week that Affinity Health Plan, Inc. will settle potential violations of the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules for more than $1.2 Million because it failed to wipe the hard drives when it returned leased photocopiers. OCR's investigation indicated that Affinity impermissibly disclosed protected health information when it returned multiple photocopiers to leasing agents without erasing the data contained on the copier hard drives. In addition, the investigation revealed that Affinity failed to incorporate the electronic protected health information (ePHI) stored on photocopier hard drives in its analysis of risks and vulnerabilities as required by the Security Rule, and failed to implement policies and procedures when returning the photocopiers to its leasing agents. The HHS press release states that Affinity estimated that up to 344,579 individuals may have been affected by this breach.

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Cord cliff coming: What happens to TV when Netflix streams live events? (AllThingsD, 19 August 2013) - Netflix has never streamed a live event, and Reed Hastings says it never will. Now, that's a wise comment for a disruptor to put unambiguously on the record - especially since the TV networks could immediately pull their content from Netflix if they ever heard otherwise. But we all know that occasionally CEOs change their minds. So that's why I decided to imagine what would happen if Netflix took on live events. And as soon as I played out the scenario, it became obvious: Sooner or later, it will. Television incumbents wouldn't need to wave off cord cutting if they weren't genuinely scared of it. New data show that 30 percent of U.S. Internet users would consider cutting their expensive and relatively despised cable subscription to watch TV exclusively online. But even with as much content as digital pure-plays like Netflix, iTunes and Hulu now offer, there's one outsized variable that's holding the whole cable bundle together: Live events. Live events are inordinately valuable. They have ultimate scarcity: They happen "right now," they provide a focal point around which hordes of people come together, and they give their viewers an "I was there!" experience beyond just the content itself. They are one of the few must-haves in consumers' media diets. Personally, I can vouch that the Olympics, the Oscars and the Boston Marathon news are the only television in the last year that drew this cord cutter's rabbit ears out of the cabinet. Live events are what cable and broadcast TV have that Netflix doesn't: News, talk shows and - most important - sports. "The biggest question we get from potential cord cutters is how to watch live sports without paying for cable," reports GigaOM. There's still no feasible alternative. At least, not yet.

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The FTC and the new common law of privacy (Dan Solove, 19 August 2013) - Abstract: One of the great ironies about information privacy law is that the primary regulation of privacy in the United States has barely been studied in a scholarly way. Since the late 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been enforcing companies' privacy policies through its authority to police unfair and deceptive trade practices. Despite more than fifteen years of FTC enforcement, there is no meaningful body of judicial decisions to show for it. The cases have nearly all resulted in settlement agreements. Nevertheless, companies look to these agreements to guide their privacy practices. Thus, in practice, FTC privacy jurisprudence has become the broadest and most influential regulating force on information privacy in the United States - more so than nearly any privacy statute and any common law tort. In this article, we contend that the FTC's privacy jurisprudence is the functional equivalent to a body of common law, and we examine it as such. We explore how and why the FTC, and not contract law, came to dominate the enforcement of privacy policies. A common view of the FTC's privacy jurisprudence is that it is thin, merely focusing on enforcing privacy promises. In contrast, a deeper look at the principles that emerge from FTC privacy "common law" demonstrates that the FTC's privacy jurisprudence is quite thick. The FTC has codified certain norms and best practices and has developed some baseline privacy protections. Standards have become so specific they resemble rules. We contend that the foundations exist to develop this "common law" into a robust privacy regulatory regime, one that focuses on consumer expectations of privacy, that extends far beyond privacy policies, and that involves a full suite of substantive rules that exist independently from a company's privacy representations.

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Prominent law site shuts down because editor worries about government reading her emails (Business Insider, 20 August 2013) - The editor of a well-respected legal site, Groklaw, has announced that she's going to stop producing the site because the government might be reading her emails. Groklaw is a collaborative site that explores the nuances of certain cases and legal decisions, including the recent Apple v. Samsung case. The editor of the site, Pamela Jones, says she can't operate the site without email. And the idea that faceless government spooks might be reading any email that she sends outside the U.S. is too much for her: "[T]he conclusion I've reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad. But it's good to be realistic. And the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how "clean" we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I don't know how to function in such an atmosphere. I don't know how to do Groklaw like this." Jones isn't just worried about being wrongly accused of crimes. For her, there's the ickiness factor of having her personal privacy violated--a feeling that she says is similar to the feeling she had when her apartment in New York was robbed and the burglar went through all of her underwear. [ Polley : Ed Felton has an interesting post about this here . For me, I'm back to using PGP, when appropriate. The open-source Macintosh package is GPGTools, and fairly straightforward to install, yielding two Apple Mail icons: "sign" and "encrypt". Keyserver distribution of public keys (e.g., thru pgp.mit.edu ) is also straightforward - look for mine under "Vincent Polley" - KeyID = AADBBDD7; phone me to confirm key fingerprint.]

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Free Law Ferret: document-to-cited-cases in a click (CitationStylist, 20 August 2013) - In the past couple of posts, I have been holding forth on the possibilities for browser-based parsing of case citations via a JavaScript port of the new parser offered up by the CourtListener project. Mike Lissner has confirmed that I was indeed off-base with the name. As it turns out, "Juriscraper" actually refers to the library used at CourtListener to scrape court websites, and not the citator that identifies references embedded in individual cases: so I put on my copywriter's hat, and chased up a brand new name. Say hello to the Free Law Ferret , a Firefox plugin that has emerged from the CitationStylist skunkworks with a ferocious curiosity and a full set of tiny adorable bibliographic teeth. * * * The Ferret will scan the document in the browser window (be it law case, legal brief, blog post or whatever), and present a list of citations in a dialog box like that shown to the right. Note that the parser presently supports US case law only: cites to the courts of other countries, to regulations, to statutory law and to international instruments and tribunals will not be recognized. Select cites in the dialog and click OK to search for each case in the CourtListener repository and open each in a separate browser tab. If the search for a case fails, you can either broaden the search terms in the CourtListener page, or search for it (manually) elsewhere. [ Polley : pretty techie, even for me. Send me feedback, please? Carl Malamud tweeted: "The Free Law Ferret searches any web doc, finds the US court cases, grabs a copy."]

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Website owners can legally block some users, court rules (Computerworld, 20 August 2013) - Public website owners have the right to selectively block users from their sites and anyone who intentionally circumvents those blocks may be violating provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a federal judge in California ruled Friday. The ruling involves a dispute between Craigslist and 3Taps Inc., an online ad aggregator that basically copies and republishes online ads. Craigslist claimed that 3Taps scrapes, collects and reposts all of Craigslist's classified advertisements in real time. In 2012, Craigslist sent a cease-and-desist letter asking 3Taps to stop accessing its website. Craigslist also separately configured the site to block access to it from any IP address associated with 3Taps. However, 3Taps used IP rotation technology and proxy servers to bypass the blocks and continued to harvest and repost data gathered from Craigslist. 3Taps admitted that it intentionally circumvented the blocking. But in a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, 3Taps noted that Craigslist, by making its website publicly available, had essentially authorized the entire Internet to access and use its content. The company claimed that allowing owners of publicly accessible websites to selectively block individuals and groups was dangerous and contrary to the notion of a free and open Internet. In a 13-page ruling, District Court Judge Charles Breyer dismissed those arguments and held that 3Taps had accessed Craigslist without specific authorization from the website owner.

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Flo Rida dodges lawsuit because he was served on Facebook (Huffington Post, 20 August 2013) - Flo Rida is feeling pretty lucky right about now: The rapper, best known for jumping on already popular songs and dishing out generally unmemorable party rap verses over the pre-existing songs, faced a six-figure lawsuit after he was an alleged no-show at the Fat As Butter festival in 2011, despite having been pre-paid for the gig. In an unusual move, the organizers of the festival served Flo Rida on Facebook -- digitally notifying him that he was due in court. Unusual, and not totally kosher, according to a judge who upheld Flo Rida's appeal of the initial ruling that allowed Mothership Music to serve the rapper (born Tramar Dillard) and his management, VIP Entertainment and Concepts, on the social network in the first place. Billboard reports that Justice Robert McFarlan, the judge who sided with Flo Rida, had this to say : "The evidence did not establish, other than by mere assertion, that the Facebook page was in fact that of Flo Rida and did not prove that a posting on it was likely to come to his attention in a timely fashion."

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A board's legal obligations for the cloud: you have to carry an umbrella (ABA, 22 August 2013) - Every day the news produces yet more articles on the vulnerability of businesses to cyberattacks. A recent Google search returned over 16,000 entries for news articles discussing how cyberspace is the new vector for attacking a company. Information security and privacy concerns are consequently some of the most heavily reported issues in the media today. With this level of coverage and reporting, what pressure is there on a company and its board of directors to mitigate the risks associated with cyberattacks? Can officers and directors of companies continue to relegate information security and data protection to the back burner? Or is data protection becoming as much an immediate responsibility of a board as financial reporting? [ Polley : interesting article by Seyfarth's John Tomaszewski.]

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Third Circuit: cellphone customers may block robocalls (Legal Intelligencer, 23 August 2013) - Cellphone customers may revoke their consent to receive robocalls on those devices, the Third Circuit has ruled in a case of first impression. Interpreting the Telephone Consumer Protection Act broadly, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed the district court's holding based on rules from the Federal Communications Commission and common-law treatment of consent. By its own reckoning, the Third Circuit is the first circuit to address the issue of whether consumers have a right to withdraw their prior consent to be robocalled on their cellphones and if there would be a time limit on that right. The three-judge panel ruled that the right exists and there is no time limit on it. "Congress passed the TCPA to protect individual consumers from receiving intrusive and unwanted calls," Senior Judge Jane R. Roth wrote on behalf of the panel, which included Judges Julio M. Fuentes and Patty Shwartz. "Notably," Roth said, setting up her discussion, "the statute does not contain any language expressly granting consumers the right to revoke their prior express consent." The court looked to rules from the FCC because Congress gave it the authority to regulate and enforce the TCPA, which was passed in 1991. The FCC issued a declaratory ruling with the most relevant guidance it has yet offered on the issue after the district court dismissed the case. Last November, the FCC offered an analysis that "was directed at the use of an automated dialing system to confirm an opt-out request, rather than whether an opt-out right exists," Roth said, but "the decision indicates that the FCC supports Gager's argument that a consumer may revoke her prior express consent once it is given."

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Facebook friends could change your credit score (CNN, 26 August 2013) - Choose your Facebook friends wisely; they could help you get approved -- or rejected -- for a loan. A handful of tech startups are using social data to determine the risk of lending to people who have a difficult time accessing credit. Traditional lenders rely heavily on credit scores like FICO, which look at payments history. They typically steer clear of the millions of people who don't have credit scores. But some financial lending companies have found that social connections can be a good indicator of a person's creditworthiness. One such company, Lenddo , determines if you're friends on Facebook with someone who was late paying back a loan to Lenddo. If so, that's bad news for you. It's even worse news if the delinquent friend is someone you frequently interact with. A German company called Kreditech says that it uses up to 8,000 data points when assessing an application for a loan. In addition to data from Facebook, eBay or Amazon accounts. Kreditech also gathers information from the manner in which a customer fills out the online application. For example, your chances of getting a loan improve if you spend time reading information about the loan on Kreditech's website. If you fill out the application typing in all-caps (or with no caps), you're knocked down a couple pegs in Kreditech's eyes. Kreditech can determines your location and considers creditworthiness based upon whether your computer is located where you said you live or work.

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Survey of faculty attitudes on technology (InsideHigherEd, 27 August 2013) - Online education arguably came of age in the last year, with the explosion of massive open online courses driving the public's (and politicians') interest in digitally delivered courses and contributing to the perception that they represent not only higher education's future, but its present. Faculty members, by and large, still aren't buying -- and they are particularly skeptical about the value of MOOCs, Inside Higher Ed's new Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology suggests. The survey of 2,251 professors, which, like Inside Higher Ed's other surveys, was conducted by Gallup, finds significant skepticism among faculty members about the quality of online learning, with only one in five of them agreeing that online courses can achieve learning outcomes equivalent to those of in-person courses, and majorities considering online learning to be of lower quality than in-person courses on several key measures (but not in terms of delivering content to meet learning objectives). But, importantly, appreciation for the quality and effectiveness of online learning grows with instructors' experiences with it. The growing minority of professors who themselves had taught at least one course online (30 percent of respondents, up from 25 percent last year) were far likelier than their peers who had not done so to believe that online courses can produce learning outcomes at least equivalent to those of face-to-face courses; 50 percent of them agree or strongly agree that online courses in their own department or discipline produce equivalent learning outcomes to in-person courses, compared to just 13 percent of professors who have not taught online. [ Polley : see related story about San Jose State University: Boost for Udacity project (InsideHigherEd, 28 August 2013)]

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It's baaaaaack: HavenCo trying once again to bring encrypted computing to the masses (but not hosted on Sealand) (TechDirt, 27 August 2013) - If you were into digital and cryptography issues a little over a decade ago, you surely remember the debacle of HavenCo, the attempt at a secure data haven hosted on the "micronation" of Sealand (better known as an abandoned platform off the coast of England that some folks "invaded" and claimed as a sovereign nation, which no government recognizes). HavenCo and Sealand was a story the press loved, and the hype level was astounding, followed by the whole project being a complete disaster. Last year, James Grimmelmann wrote a fantastic look-back/post-mortem of HavenCo and an even more detailed and comprehensive legal review paper all about Sealand and HavenCo. If you want the history of all of this, start there. Or, if you want the fictional account of the mindset that went into HavenCo, pick up a copy of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon . Now, it's being reported that James Bates, grandson of Roy Bates, the "founder" of Sealand, has teamed back up with Avi Freedman, one of the initial funders of HavenCo, to relaunch the project with a focus on bringing data security to the masses. Feel free to insert whatever skepticism you have for this project right now, because you're not alone. To their credit, there are two things that are different this time around. First up, they're not trying to host the data center itself on Sealand, which was a part (just a part!) of the mess the last time around. Instead, they're just using Sealand to host air-gapped machines with encryption keys. The actual data will be encrypted, but hosted elsewhere, including in the US and EU, where they believe it will be safe because of the encryption.

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NOTED PODCASTS

Oliver Goodenough on creating a law school e-curriculum (Berkman, 8 July 2013; 71 minutes) - Legal practice and legal education both face disruptive change due to technology. Oliver R. Goodenough -- Berkman Fellow, Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School, and Adjunct Professor at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College -- discusses how technology is shaping legal practice, and how learning from this phenomenon should be a priority for any school looking to provide a useful education for the lawyers.

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RESOURCES

Disclosures, disclaimers, and designs of ethical and effective law blogs and law firm web sites (Walter Effross, 19 August 2013) - Reviews relevant ABA and state bar professional responsibility rules and advisory ethics opinions; identifies a range of issues and statutes that could entangle site operators; provides numerous examples of terms and conditions that some sites have adopted to address these issues; and explores additional practices and procedures to safeguard sites.

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LOOKING BACK - MIRLN TEN YEARS AGO

(note: link-rot has affected about 50% of these original URLs)

Not Your Father's Encyclopedia (Wired, 28 Jan 2003) -- One of the Web's first open-source encyclopedias has reached a milestone, just two years since its inception. Last week, the English-language version of Wikipedia, a free multilingual encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers on the Internet, published its 100,000th article. More than 37,000 articles populate the non-English editions. Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which are written and edited by professionals, Wikipedia is the result of work by thousands of volunteers. Anyone can contribute an article -- or edit an existing one -- at any time. The site runs on Wiki software, a collaborative application that allows users to collectively author Web documents without having to register first. "People from very diverse backgrounds can agree on what can be in an encyclopedia article, even if they can't agree on something else," said Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia topics range from Internet terms, such as spamming and trolling, to more mundane subjects, such as unicycling. Each page on the site contains an "Edit this page" link, which users can click on to edit, reposition and revise passages created by other writers. Once a user has made an edit, those changes are posted immediately. Users can also view older versions of a page, discuss the page, view links on a page or see related changes. These options allow contributors to constantly refine and comment upon entries. All articles are covered by the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Documentation License, which allows anyone to reuse the entries for any purpose, including commercially, as long as they preserve that same right to others and provide proper credit to Wikipedia. This open-content license ensures that Wikipedia's content will always remain free.

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BBC to give away school syllabus online (Guardian, 10 Jan 2003) -- The government yesterday gave the BBC the green light to spend [ca. $220m] to put the national curriculum on to the internet, sparking anger among firms already manufacturing interactive teaching materials. The project, called the Digital Curriculum, will use licence fee payers' money to make large parts of the school syllabus available online, free of charge, for pupils in school and at home. But commercial rivals, through a pressure group whose members include Channel 4, ITV company Granada and Penguin books owner Pearson, expressed "profound disappointment" at the decision. They claim that by using licence fee money on the project and then giving away teaching aids for free, the BBC's actions could deprive them of [ca. $600m] in revenues. Small software providers fear they could be put out of business. The commercial sector's anger is likely to intensify the debate over how the BBC is regulated. Many argue that the system of giving ministers the final say over big decisions is not working and the corporation should be brought under the full control of the new independent communications regulator, Ofcom.

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NOTES

MIRLN (Misc. IT Related Legal News) is a free e-newsletter published every three weeks by Vince Polley at KnowConnect PLLC. You can subscribe to the MIRLN distribution list by sending email to Vince Polley ( mailto:vpolley@knowconnect.com?subject=MIRLN ) with the word "MIRLN" in the subject line. Unsubscribe by sending email to Vince with the words "MIRLN REMOVAL" in the subject line.

Recent MIRLN issues are archived at www.knowconnect.com/mirln . Get supplemental information through Twitter: http://twitter.com/vpolley #mirln.

SOURCES (inter alia):

1. The Filter, a publication of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

2. InsideHigherEd - http://www.insidehighered.com/

3. SANS Newsbites, sans@sans.org

4. NewsScan and Innovation, http://www.newsscan.com

5. Aon's Technology & Professional Risks Newsletter

6. Crypto-Gram, http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html

7. McGuire Wood's Technology & Business Articles of Note

8. Steptoe & Johnson's E-Commerce Law Week

9. Eric Goldman's Technology and Marketing Law Blog, http://blog.ericgoldman.org/

10. The Benton Foundation's Communications Headlines

11. Readers' submissions, and the editor's discoveries

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