It’s Too Complicated: How the Internet Upends Katz, Smith, and Electronic Surveillance Law with Susan Landau

Description

It’s Too Complicated: How the Internet Upends Katz, Smith, and Electronic Surveillance Law with Susan Landau, Professor of Cybersecurity Policy

Electronic surveillance law seeks to balance protecting the privacy of the people while enabling government's surveillance capabilities. In the US, legal frameworks governing surveillance have, for forty years, drawn a distinction between content and non-content components of communication. The non-content portion of a communication and those aspects of non-content being shared with a third party receive a lower degree of privacy protection than the content shared between two communicating parties. Such protections were developed in an era when public service telephony reigned. Today’s communications systems, particularly on the Internet, are far more complex. In this talk, I show how complexity collapses traditional content/non-content distinctions and disrupts application of the third party doctrine to such an extent that, in many circumstances, they have become too difficult for courts to construe and apply consistently. It's too complicated.

Live Stream Here:  https://yalelaw.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=7925ba85-df4b-41cf-aa65-843abeab995d

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Center for Global Legal Challenges and ISP