position:law professor

A firsthand report of ‘inhumane conditions’ at a migrant children’s detention facility | PBS NewsHour
▻https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-firsthand-report-of-inhumane-conditions-at-a-migrant-childrens-detention-faci

https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2019/06/HarshDetention-1024x683.jpg

Editor’s Note: After our broadcast, CPB responded to our request for comment with the following statement:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) leverages our limited resources to provide the best care possible to those in our custody, especially children. As DHS and CBP leadership have noted numerous times, our short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations and we urgently need additional humanitarian funding to manage this crisis. CBP works closely with our partners at the Department of Health and Human Services to transfer unaccompanied children to their custody as soon as placement is identified, and as quickly and expeditiously as possible to ensure proper care.

All allegations of civil rights abuses or mistreatment in CBP detention are taken seriously and investigated to the fullest extent possible.

The Associated Press details grave conditions inside a Texas migrant detention facility where 250 infants, children and teenagers were being held without adequate food, water or sanitation during a recent visit. Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University, joins William Brangham to share her firsthand account, what Border Patrol agents think and what’s next for these children.

#états-unis #migrations #enfants #camps_de_concentration

China working on data privacy law but enforcement is a stumbling block | South China Morning Post
▻https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3008844/china-working-data-privacy-law-enforcement-stumbling-block

En Chine des scientifiques s’inquiètent de la collection de données sans limites et des abus possibles par le gouvernment et des acteurs privés. Au niveau politique on essaye d’introduire des lois protégeant les données et la vie privée. D’après l’article les véritables problèmes se poseront lors de l’implémentation d’une nouvelle législation en la matière.

Echo Xie 5 May, 2019 - Biometric data in particular needs to be protected from abuse from the state and businesses, analysts say
Country is expected to have 626 million surveillance cameras fitted with facial recognition software by 2020

In what is seen as a major step to protect citizens’ personal information, especially their biometric data, from abuse, China’s legislators are drafting a new law to safeguard data privacy, according to industry observers – but enforcement remains a major concern.

“China’s private data protection law will be released and implemented soon, because of the fast development of technology, and the huge demand in society,” Zeng Liaoyuan, associate professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, said in an interview .

Technology is rapidly changing life in China but relevant regulations had yet to catch up, Zeng said.

Artificial intelligence and its many applications constitute a major component of China’s national plan. In 2017, the “Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” called for the country to become the world leader in AI innovation by 2030.

Biometrics authentication is used in computer science as an identification or access control. It includes fingerprinting, face recognition, DNA, iris recognition, palm prints and other methods.

In particular, the use of biometric data has grown exponentially in key areas: scanning users’ fingerprints or face to pay bills, to apply for social security qualification and even to repay loans. But the lack of an overarching law lets companies gain access to vast quantities of an individual’s personal data, a practice that has raised privacy concerns.

During the “two sessions” last month, National People’s Congress spokesman Zhang Yesui said the authorities had hastened the drafting of a law to protect personal data, but did not say when it would be completed or enacted.

One important focus, analysts say, is ensuring that the state does not abuse its power when collecting and using private data, considering the mass surveillance systems installed in China.

“This is a big problem in China,” said Liu Deliang, a law professor at Beijing Normal University. “Because it’s about regulating the government’s abuse of power, so it’s not only a law issue but a constitutional issue.”

The Chinese government is a major collector and user of privacy data. According to IHS Markit, a London-based market research firm, China had 176 million surveillance cameras in operation in 2016 and the number was set to reach 626 million by 2020.

In any proposed law, the misuse of data should be clearly defined and even the government should bear legal responsibility for its misuse, Liu said.

“We can have legislation to prevent the government from misusing private data but the hard thing is how to enforce it.”

Especially crucial, legal experts say, is privacy protection for biometric data.

“Compared with other private data, biometrics has its uniqueness. It could post long-term risk and seriousness of consequence,” said Wu Shenkuo, an associate law professor at Beijing Normal University.

“Therefore, we need to pay more attention to the scope and limitations of collecting and using biometrics.”

Yi Tong, a lawmaker from Beijing, filed a proposal concerning biometrics legislation at the National People’s Congress session last month.

“Once private biometric data is leaked, it’s a lifetime leak and it will put the users’ private data security into greater uncertainty, which might lead to a series of risks,” the proposal said.

Yi suggested clarifying the boundary between state power and private rights, and strengthening the management of companies.

In terms of governance, Wu said China should specify the qualifications entities must have before they can collect, use and process private biometric data. He also said the law should identify which regulatory agencies would certify companies’ information.

There was a need to restrict government behaviour when collecting private data, he said, and suggested some form of compensation for those whose data was misused.

“Private data collection at the government level might involve the need for the public interest,” he said. “In this case, in addition to ensuring the legal procedure, the damage to personal interests should be compensated.”

Still, data leaks, or overcollecting, is common in China.

A survey released by the China Consumers Association in August showed that more than 85 per cent of respondents had suffered some sort of data leak, such as their cellphone numbers being sold to spammers or their bank accounts being stolen.

Another report by the association in November found that of the 100 apps it investigated, 91 had problems with overcollecting private data.

One of them, MeituPic, an image editing software program, was criticised for collecting too much biometric data.

The report also cited Ant Financial Services, the operator of the Alipay online payments service, for the way it collects private data, which it said was incompatible with the national standard. Ant Financial is an affiliate of Alibaba Group, which owns the South China Morning Post.

In January last year, Ant Financial had to apologise publicly for automatically signing up users for a social credit programme without obtaining their consent.

“When a company asks for a user’s private data, it’s unscrupulous, because we don’t have a law to limit their behaviour,” Zeng said.

“Also it’s about business competition. Every company wants to hold its customers, and one way is to collect their information as much as possible.”

Tencent and Alibaba, China’s two largest internet companies, did not respond to requests for comment about the pending legislation.

#Chine #droit #vie_privée #surveillance #politique

Cisjordanie : échauffourées près d’un village de bédouins promis à la démolition
L’Express - Par AFP , mis à jour le 15/09/2018 à 08:44

▻https://www.lexpress.fr/actualites/1/monde/cisjordanie-echauffourees-pres-d-un-village-de-bedouins-promis-a-la-demolit

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Un bulldozer israélien a tenté de barrer la route menant au village de Khan al-Ahmar en y déversant des pierres et de la terre, ce qui a provoqué des heurts.

Trois manifestants ont été arrêtés, a précisé un porte-parole de la police.

Parmi eux figure un professeur français de droit, Frank Romano, ont indiqué des manifestants, mais la police n’a pas confirmé.

Après des années de bataille judiciaire, la Cour suprême israélienne a donné la semaine dernière son feu vert à la démolition de Khan al-Ahmar, village de tôle et de toile où vivent environ 200 bédouins à l’est de Jérusalem, près de colonies israéliennes.

#Khan_al-Ahmar

“National security” cited as reason Al Jazeera nixed Israel lobby film | The Electronic Intifada
▻https://electronicintifada.net/content/national-security-cited-reason-al-jazeera-nixed-israel-lobby-film/24566

Al Jazeera’s investigative documentary into the US Israel lobby was censored by Qatar over “national security” fears, The Electronic Intifada has learned.

These include that broadcast of the film could add to pressure for the US to pull its massive Al Udeid air base out of the Gulf state, or make a Saudi military invasion more likely.

A source has confirmed that broadcast of The Lobby – USA was indefinitely delayed as “a matter of national security” for Qatar. The source has been briefed by a high-level individual in Doha.

One of the Israel lobby groups whose activities are revealed in the film has been mounting a campaign to convince the US to withdraw its military forces from Qatar – which leaders in the emirate would see as a major blow to their security.

The tiny gas-rich monarchy houses and funds satellite channel Al Jazeera.

In April, managers at the channel were forced to deny a claim by a right-wing American Zionist group that the program has been canceled altogether.

In October 2017, the head of Al Jazeera’s investigative unit promised that the film would be aired “very soon.”

Yet eight months later, it has yet to see the light of day.

In March, The Electronic Intifada exclusively published the first concrete details of what is in the film.

The film reportedly identifies a number of lobby groups as working directly with Israel to spy on American citizens using sophisticated data gathering techniques. The documentary is also said to cast light on covert efforts to smear and intimidate Americans seen as too critical of Israel.

Some of the activity revealed in the film could include US organizations acting as front operations for Israel without registering as agents of a foreign state as required by US law.

The latest revelation over the censored film shows how seriously Qatar’s leadership is taking threats of repercussions should it air.

Threats
The Israel lobby groups reported on in the film could be expected to take legal action against Al Jazeera if it is broadcast.

However, such threats alone would be unlikely to deter Al Jazeera from broadcasting the film.

The network has a history of vigorously defending its work and it was completely vindicated over complaints about a documentary aired in January 2017 that revealed how Israel lobby groups in Britain collude with the Israeli embassy, and how the embassy interfered in British politics.

Israel’s supporters are also pushing for the US Congress to force the network, which has a large US operation, to register as a “foreign agent” in a similar fashion to Russian channel RT.

But the high-level individual in Doha’s claim that the film is being censored as “a matter of national security” ties the affair to even more serious threats to Qatar and bolsters the conclusion that the censorship is being ordered at the highest level of the state.

A year ago, with the support of US President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar and imposed a transport and economic blockade on the country.

Saudi rulers and their allies see Qatar as too independent of their influence and too open to relations with their regional rival Iran, and the blockade was an attempt to force it to heel.

The Saudis and Israel accused Qatar of funding “terrorism,” and have taken measures to restrict Al Jazeera or demanded it be shut down altogether over what they perceive as the channel’s anti-Israel and anti-Saudi-monarchy biases.

The blockade and the diplomatic assault sparked existential fears in Qatar that Saudi-led forces could go as far as to invade and install a more pliant regime in Doha.

French newspaper Le Monde reported on Friday that the Saudi king has threatened “military action” against Qatar should it go ahead with a planned purchase of a Russian air defense missile system.

In 2011, Saudi and Emirati forces intervened in Bahrain, another small Gulf nation, at the request of its ruling Khalifa monarchy in order to quell a popular uprising demanding democratic reforms.

For three years, US and British-backed Saudi and Emirati forces have been waging a bloody and devastating war on Yemen to reimpose a Saudi-backed leadership on the country, clear evidence of their unprecedented readiness to directly use military force to impose their will.

And no one in the region will have forgotten how quickly Iraqi forces were able to sweep in and take over Kuwait in August 1990.

Air base
The lesson of the Kuwait invasion for other small Gulf countries is that only the protection of the United States could guarantee their security from bigger neighbors.

Qatar implemented that lesson by hosting the largest US military facility in the region, the massive Al Udeid air base.

The Saudi-led bloc has pushed for the US to withdraw from the base and the Saudi foreign minister predicted that should the Americans pull out of Al Udeid, the regime in Doha would fall “in less than a week.”

US warplanes operate from the Al Udeid air base near Doha, Qatar, October 2017. US Air Force Photo
It would be a disaster from the perspective of Doha if the Israel lobby was to put its full weight behind a campaign to pull US forces out of Qatar.

Earlier this year, an influential member of Congress and a former US defense secretary publicly discussed moving the US base out of Qatar at a conference hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

FDD is a neoconservative Israel lobby group that happens to be one of the subjects of the undercover Al Jazeera film.

As The Electronic Intifada revealed in March, FDD is one of the groups acting as an agent of the Israeli government even though it is not registered to do so.

In July 2017, FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer testified to Congress that it would be an “insane arrangement” to keep US forces at the Al Udeid air base while Qatar continued to support “terror.”

It will concentrate minds in Doha that FDD was one of the lobby groups most dedicated to destroying the international deal with Iran over its nuclear energy program, a goal effectively achieved when the Trump administration pulled out of it last month.

In a sign of how vulnerable Qatar feels over the issue, Doha has announced plans to upgrade the Al Udeid base in the hope, as the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes put it, “that the strategic military hub will be counted as one of the Pentagon’s permanent overseas installations.”

The final straw?
The cornerstone of Qatar’s effort to win back favor in Washington has been to aggressively compete with its Gulf rivals for the affections of Israel and its Washington lobby.

Their belief appears to be that this lobby is so influential that winning its support can result in favorable changes to US policy.

Qatar’s charm offensive has included junkets to Doha for such high-profile Israel supporters as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America who publicly took credit for convincing Qatar’s ruler Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to veto broadcast of the documentary.

While an all-out Saudi invasion of Qatar over a film series may seem far fetched, the thinking in Doha seems to be that broadcast of The Lobby – USA could be the final straw that antagonizes Qatar’s enemies and exposes it to further danger – especially over Al Udeid.

With an administration in Washington that is seen as impulsive and unpredictable – it has just launched a trade war against its biggest partners Canada and the European Union – leaders in Doha may see it as foolhardy to take any chances.

If that is the reason Al Jazeera’s film has been suppressed it is not so much a measure of any real and imminent threat Qatar faces, but rather of how successfully the lobby has convinced Arab rulers, including in Doha, that their well-being and longevity rests on cooperating with, or at least not crossing, Israel and its backers.

Asa Winstanley is associate editor and Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.

Qatar Al Jazeera The Lobby—USA Al Udeid air base Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani Donald Trump Jared Kushner Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates Bahrain Iran Kuwait Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Jonathan Schanzer Morton Klein Alan Dershowitz Zionist Organization of America

Gaza medic killed by Israel as she rescued injured
Ali Abunimah 2 June 2018

Who is the Labour Party’s “witchfinder general”?
Asa Winstanley 31 May 2018

Israeli minister threatens to destroy Gaza “once and for all”
Ali Abunimah 30 May 2018

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The Corporation - Full Movie
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHrhqtY2khc

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/43/Movie_poster_the_corporation.jpg

Mark Achbar | Hello Cool World Media
▻http://hellocoolworld.com/mark-achbar

The Corporation (2003 film) - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)

The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern-day corporation. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the documentary.

Squel | The Corporation
▻http://thecorporation.com

More than a decade after The Corporation started a global conversation about the modern business corporation, best-selling author and scholar Joel Bakan is now working on a follow-up project that focuses on the corporation’s remarkable evolution and transformation since the first film.

“The original film was a call to action,” says Joel Bakan. “Now an entire generation of advocates, from both within and outside corporations, is successfully demanding that major corporations redefine their very purposes and missions to include social and environmental values.”

As today’s leading companies embed social responsibility and sustainability at the hearts of their business models and operations, the new film reveals an emerging ethos of shared value, a rejection of short-termism, and a new conviction that the best way for companies to do well is by doing good.

#capitalisme #film #documentaire

Hundreds of Travelers Had Their Global Entry Airport Privileges Revoked — Lawyers Say It’s Another Muslim Ban
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/12/14/global-entry-trump-travel-ban-muslims

Zahr Said didn’t think much about her inability to check in online for her flight home to Seattle after an October business trip in Beijing. She also didn’t worry too much about being twice singled out for additional screening before boarding her flight and again at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint at Seattle International Airport. The University of Washington law professor assumed the heightened security measures might have been linked to an annual weeklong Communist (...)

#Islam #voyageurs #surveillance

##voyageurs

The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death. - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/technology/internet-dying-repeal-net-neutrality.html

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Because net neutrality shelters start-ups — which can’t easily pay for fast-line access — from internet giants that can pay, the rules are just about the last bulwark against the complete corporate takeover of much of online life. When the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look like and feel like something else altogether — a network in which business development deals, rather than innovation, determine what you experience, a network that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix.

If this sounds alarmist, consider that the state of digital competition is already pretty sorry. As I’ve argued regularly, much of the tech industry is at risk of getting swallowed by giants. Today’s internet is lousy with gatekeepers, tollbooths and monopolists.

The five most valuable American companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — control much of the online infrastructure, from app stores to operating systems to cloud storage to nearly all of the online ad business. A handful of broadband companies — AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, many of which are also aiming to become content companies, because why not — provide virtually all the internet connections to American homes and smartphones.

Together these giants have carved the internet into a historically profitable system of fiefs. They have turned a network whose very promise was endless innovation into one stuck in mud, where every start-up is at the tender mercy of some of the largest corporations on the planet.

This was not the way the internet was supposed to go. At its deepest technical level, the internet was designed to avoid the central points of control that now command it. The technical scheme arose from an even deeper philosophy. The designers of the internet understood that communications networks gain new powers through their end nodes — that is, through the new devices and services that plug into the network, rather than the computers that manage traffic on the network. This is known as the “end-to-end” principle of network design, and it basically explains why the internet led to so many more innovations than the centralized networks that came before it, such as the old telephone network.

But if flexibility was the early internet’s promise, it was soon imperiled. In 2003, Tim Wu, a law professor now at Columbia Law School (he’s also a contributor to The New York Times), saw signs of impending corporate control over the growing internet. Broadband companies that were investing great sums to roll out faster and faster internet service to Americans were becoming wary of running an anything-goes network.

To Mr. Wu, the broadband monopolies looked like a threat to the end-to-end idea that had powered the internet. In a legal journal, he outlined an idea for regulation to preserve the internet’s equal-opportunity design — and hence was born “net neutrality.”

Though it has been through a barrage of legal challenges and resurrections, some form of net neutrality has been the governing regime on the internet since 2005. The new F.C.C. order would undo the idea completely; companies would be allowed to block or demand payment for certain traffic as they liked, as long as they disclosed the arrangements.

But look, you might say: Despite the hand-wringing, the internet has kept on trucking. Start-ups are still getting funded and going public. Crazy new things still sometimes get invented and defy all expectations; Bitcoin, which is as Wild West as they come, just hit $10,000 on some exchanges.

Well, O.K. But a vibrant network doesn’t die all at once. It takes time and neglect; it grows weaker by the day, but imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole thing as normal.

It’s not normal. It wasn’t always this way. The internet doesn’t have to be a corporate playground. That’s just the path we’ve chosen.

#Neutralité_internet #Vectorialisme

Amazon’s Latest Way Into Your Life Is Through the Front Door - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/technology/amazon-key-home.html

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For many online shoppers, packages often linger for distressingly long hours outside their homes, where they can be stolen or soaked by rain. Now, if customers give it permission, Amazon’s couriers will unlock the front doors and drop packages inside when no one is home.

What could possibly go wrong?

The head spins with the opportunities for mischief in letting a stranger into an empty home. There are risks for couriers too — whether it’s an attacking dog or an escaping cat. To allay these concerns, Amazon is asking customers to trust it — buy a package of technology including an internet-connected smart lock and an indoor security camera.

Amazon isn’t the only business that believes this is the future of internet shopping, as well as other services that require home access, like dog walking and house keeping. This summer, a start-up that makes smart locks, Latch, struck a deal with Jet.com, an online shopping site owned by Walmart, to jointly pay for the installation of its locks on 1,000 apartment buildings in New York City to make deliveries easier. The arrangement offers some of the security of a doorman for people who live in buildings without them.

Quand les plateformes s’étendent à des relations qui auparavant demandaient une co-présence et une co-connaissance des participants (par exemple avec les employées de maison). Qu’est-ce qui construit la confiance dans le monde numérique.

Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington who specializes in legal issues related to technology, said Amazon’s new service relies on the same kind of trust homeowners commonly extend to services to which they hand over their keys. But he said those agreements often involve in-person interactions, which won’t happen when homeowners allow Amazon to unlock its doors.

“It raises questions about how do you specify and police expectations when the relationship is one mediated almost entirely by technology?” Mr. Calo said.

#Comerce_électronique #Confiance #Plateformes #Amazon

In Defense of Cultural Appropriation - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/opinion/in-defense-of-cultural-appropriation.html

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What is cultural appropriation, and why is it so controversial? Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University, defines it as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission.” This can include the “unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

Appropriation suggests theft, and a process analogous to the seizure of land or artifacts. In the case of culture, however, what is called appropriation is not theft but messy interaction. Writers and artists necessarily engage with the experiences of others. Nobody owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one, and in inhabiting a culture, one finds the tools for reaching out to other cultures.

Critics of cultural appropriation insist that they are opposed not to cultural engagement, but to racism. They want to protect marginalized cultures and ensure that such cultures speak for themselves, not simply be seen through the eyes of more privileged groups.

There are few figures more important to the development of rock ’n’ roll than Chuck Berry (who died in March). In the 1950s, white radio stations refused to play his songs, categorizing them as “race music.” Then came Elvis Presley. A white boy playing the same tunes was cool. Elvis was feted, Mr. Berry and other black pioneers largely ignored. Racism defined who became the cultural icon.

But imagine that Elvis had been prevented from appropriating so-called black music. Would that have challenged racism, or eradicated Jim Crow laws? Clearly not. It took a social struggle — the civil rights movement — to bring about change. That struggle was built not on cultural separation, but on the demand for equal rights and universal values.

#Appropriabilité #racisme #folklore #culture

Twelve Years an Asylum Seeker: ECHR Ruling Will Help Refugees in Limbo

The European Court of Human Rights has delivered a victory for a Turkish refugee left in limbo in Greece for more than a decade. Law professor Markos Karavias says it has major implications for E.U. states dragging their feet on asylum claims.

▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/community/2016/12/08/twelve-years-an-asylum-seeker-echr-ruling-will-help-refugees-in-limbo
#limbe #procédure_d'asile #attente #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Grèce #jurisprudence

“Guns Down” Project To Fight Back Against Firearm-Related Voter Intimidation On Election Day

▻http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/03/guns-down-project-fight-back-against-firearm-related-voter-intimidation-election-day/214271

http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/uploader/image/2016/11/03/gunsdownjpg.jpg

Il faudrait envoyer des observateurs internationaux pour aider cette #démocratie balbutiante dans ses #élections

Amid heightened concerns about voter intimidation involving the open carrying of firearms at polling locations on Election Day, a project called Guns Down is providing a resource for voters to report intimidation to voter protection advocates and to share their experiences on social media.

According to The Washington Post, “many election officials across the country are, for the very first time, bracing for intimidation or even violence on Election Day,” and these fears are compounded given that “most states have no laws regarding guns in polling places.”

Under federal law it is illegal to intimidate people trying to vote with guns or by other means.

Yet the Post reports that “state laws about guns and voter intimidation are a patchwork of wildly varying regulations,” and determinations of violations of voter intimidation laws can be difficult to ascertain because each one is “a fact-sensitive, context-based decision,” according to UCLA law professor Adam Winkler.(Further complicating determinations are discordant federal appeals courts rulings on what behavior constitutes voter intimidation).

#armes

Baltimore police accused of illegal mobile spectrum use with stingrays
▻http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/baltimore-police-accused-of-illegal-mobile-spectrum-use-with-stingrays

Georgetown law prof argues that stingray use violates FCC laws, should be halted. A law professor has filed a formal legal complaint on behalf of three advocacy organizations, arguing that stingray use by law enforcement agencies nationwide—and the Baltimore Police Department in particular—violate Federal Communications Commission rules. The new 38-page complaint makes a creative argument that because stingrays, or cell-site simulators, act as fake cell towers, that law enforcement agencies (...)

#IMSI-catchers #écoutes #surveillance

La bagarre juridique pour la #Mer_de_Chine_méridionale pourrait avoir des retombées désastreuses pour les É.-U. …

U.S., Japan, and Other Nations Could Lose Exclusive Economic Zones - Bloomberg
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-07-28/u-s-japan-and-other-nations-could-lose-exclusive-economic-zones

The U.S. and other coastal nations could lose millions of square nautical miles of ocean that are now in their exclusive economic zones. The loss would be an indirect result of an arbitration panel’s ruling on China’s dispute with the Philippines in the South China Sea.

Largely overlooked in the tribunal’s July 12 decision was a strict interpretation of which dry land is entitled to a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone—the surrounding ocean where a nation has sole rights to fish, drill for oil, and search for minerals. While not a legal precedent, the 479-page ruling could influence other judges and arbitrators because of its rigorous argument. “These arbitrators knew that this case was being watched around the world,” says Paul Reichler, a partner in law firm Foley Hoag and lead counsel for the Philippines. “They wanted it to be as close to perfect as possible.”

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea doesn’t allow nations to declare exclusive economic zones around “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own.” What that’s meant has never been clear. Many countries, including the U.S. and Japan, have claimed exclusive economic zones around tiny atolls and outcroppings of rock. The U.S. hasn’t ratified the treaty because of opposition from congressional Republicans, who fear it would open the U.S. to lawsuits. But the U.S. “scrupulously” follows the treaty’s provisions anyway, says James Kraska, a law professor at the U.S. Naval War College. Push could come to shove if another nation seeks to fish or drill or mine in waters surrounding some dinky U.S. rock.

The tribunal concluded that having people live on an island doesn’t prove habitability if food and water comes from elsewhere. Countries will “now have a greatly reduced incentive” to fight over ownership of rocks if they no longer have exclusive zones, Kraska says. On the minus side, fisheries might be depleted quickly if countries lose the ability to curb fishing in these zones.

The secret rules of the #internet | The Verge
►http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderator-history-youtube-facebook-reddit-censorship-free-speech

https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZyoST1dGP7zWW-7Hh6ISudDQFnw=/1200x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6330611/ericPetersen_skyscraper_RGB_fin.0.jpg

Mora-Blanco is one of more than a dozen current and former employees and contractors of major internet platforms from YouTube to Facebook who spoke to us candidly about the dawn of content moderation. Many of these individuals are going public with their experiences for the first time. Their stories reveal how the boundaries of free speech were drawn during a period of explosive growth for a high-stakes public domain, one that did not exist for most of human history. As law professor Jeffrey Rosen first said many years ago of Facebook, these platforms have “more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president.”

#free_speech #modération #surveillance #contrôle #liberté_d'expression #féminisme à plusieurs niveaux (ne serait-ce que parce que la grande majorité des modérateurices sont des femmes et mal payées, et décrivent ce #travail comme une #guerre), des #blackface aussi, etc etc ; énorme article donc, et avec un beau travail d’illustration

Le fondateur de Facebook devient papa et annonce le don de 99% de ses actions
▻http://www.rtbf.be/info/medias/detail_le-fondateur-de-facebook-devient-papa-et-annonce-le-don-de-99-de-ses-act

Ah ?

Le patron-fondateur de Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg et son épouse Priscilla Chan ont annoncé mardi la naissance de leur premier enfant, une fille, ainsi que le don au cours de leurs vies de 99% de leurs actions à une nouvelle fondation, la « Chan Zuckerberg Initiative ».

Ah OK...

“French civil liberties and the ’spirit of sacrifice’ - With a state of emergency in place and surveillance increasing, how much will the French accept in the name of security ?”
▻http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/11/french-civil-liberties-spirit-sacrifice-151130074036371.html #terrorisme #sécurité #état_d'urgence #autoritarisme

"The experience of repressive regimes such as [Nicolae] Ceausescu’s Romania is that increasing surveillance decreases the level of #trust that people have for their #government and makes them less cooperative and less supportive of the government" Paul Bernal, a law professor at Britain’s University of East Anglia and the author of Internet Privacy Rights: Rights to Protect Autonomy, explains.

“Emergency’ powers need to be maintained only for emergencies: the longer these kinds of powers are kept after an obvious emergency, the easier it is for trust to be damaged”. He adds that powers introduced for one reason could be used for others - a “prime danger usually known as ’function creep’ or ’mission creep’”.

"Right now, in Paris, some of the powers brought in to combat terrorism seem to be being used to control protesters and others at the climate change conference, for example. Powers might be used to stifle dissent, to clamp down on people like environmental campaigners, students and so forth. It needs a huge amount of care to avoid this problem - in practice it seems to happen all the time"

Cops are asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for their customers’ DNA | Fusion
▻http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-asking-ancestry-com-and-23andme-for-their-custo

When companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe first invited people to send in their DNA for genealogy tracing and medical diagnostic tests, privacy advocates warned about the creation of giant genetic databases that might one day be used against participants by law enforcement. DNA, after all, can be a key to solving crimes. It “has serious information about you and your family,” genetic privacy advocate Jeremy Gruber told me back in 2010 when such services were just getting popular.

Now, five years later, when 23andMe and Ancestry both have over a million customers, those warnings are looking prescient. “Your relative’s DNA could turn you into a suspect,” warns Wired, writing about a case from earlier this year, in which New Orleans filmmaker Michael Usry became a suspect in an unsolved murder case after cops did a familial genetic search using semen collected in 1996. The cops searched an Ancestry.com database and got a familial match to a saliva sample Usry’s father had given years earlier. Usry was ultimately determined to be innocent and the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “wild goose chase” that demonstrated “the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases.”

The FBI maintains a national genetic database with samples from convicts and arrestees, but this was the most public example of cops turning to private genetic databases to find a suspect. But it’s not the only time it’s happened, and it means that people who submitted genetic samples for reasons of health, curiosity, or to advance science could now end up in a genetic line-up of criminal suspects.

Both Ancestry.com and 23andMe stipulate in their privacy policies that they will turn information over to law enforcement if served with a court order. 23andMe says it’s received a couple of requests from both state law enforcement and the FBI, but that it has “successfully resisted them.”

23andMe’s first privacy officer Kate Black, who joined the company in February, says 23andMe plans to launch a transparency report, like those published by Google, Facebook and Twitter, within the next month or so. The report, she says, will reveal how many government requests for information the company has received, and presumably, how many it complies with. (Update: The company released the report a week later.)

“In the event we are required by law to make a disclosure, we will notify the affected customer through the contact information provided to us, unless doing so would violate the law or a court order,” said Black by email.

Ancestry.com would not say specifically how many requests it’s gotten from law enforcement. It wanted to clarify that in the Usry case, the particular database searched was a publicly available one that Ancestry has since taken offline with a message about the site being “used for purposes other than that which it was intended.” Police came to Ancestry.com with a warrant to get the name that matched the DNA.

“On occasion when required by law to do so, and in this instance we were, we have cooperated with law enforcement and the courts to provide only the specific information requested but we don’t comment on the specifics of cases,” said a spokesperson.

As NYU law professor Erin Murphy told the New Orleans Advocate regarding the Usry case, gathering DNA information is “a series of totally reasonable steps by law enforcement.” If you’re a cop trying to solve a crime, and you have DNA at your disposal, you’re going to want to use it to further your investigation. But the fact that your signing up for 23andMe or Ancestry.com means that you and all of your current and future family members could become genetic criminal suspects is not something most users probably have in mind when trying to find out where their ancestors came from.

“It has this really Orwellian state feeling to it,” Murphy said to the Advocate.

If the idea of investigators poking through your DNA freaks you out, both Ancestry.com and 23andMe have options to delete your information with the sites. 23andMe says it will delete information within 30 days upon request.

Iraqis, Azerbaijani, Ukrainian Movement Among Sakharov Prize Nominees
▻http://www.rferl.org/content/sakharov-prize-iraqi-azerbaijani-yunus-euromaidan-nominees/26595475.html

A law professor and a Christian religious leader in Iraq, an Azerbaijani rights defender, and Ukraine’s pro-Western Euromaidan movement are among the nominees for the European Parliament’s 2014 Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought.

The two Iraqi nominees — Mahmud Al ’Asali and the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Babylon, Louis Raphael Sako — have both spoken out against anti-Christian persecution in Iraq. Asali was killed in July.

Azerbaijani human rights activist Leyla Yunus, who has been involved in people-to-people diplomacy with Armenian rights activists, is currently in pretrial detention on high treason charges. 

The Euromaidan movement derived from a wave of pro-EU demonstrations across Ukraine that led to President Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster in February.

Two European Parliament committees will shortlist three finalists next month.

The 50,000 euro ($64,200) Sakharov Prize is awarded annually to honor defenders of human rights and freedom of expression.

Soldier’s Lawyers Rest Case With a Defense of WikiLeaks’ Journalistic Role - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/us/soldiers-lawyers-rest-case-with-a-defense-of-wikileaks-journalistic-role.ht

The defense in the court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning rested its case Wednesday with a Harvard law professor testifying that WikiLeaks performed a legitimate journalistic function when Private Manning gave it vast archives of secret government files.

The professor, Yochai Benkler, who wrote a widely cited academic article about WikiLeaks and the evolution of watchdog journalism in the Internet era, testified that at the time of Private Manning’s leaks the group had established itself as playing a reputable and valuable journalistic role by publishing documents about corporate misconduct and government corruption around the world.

N.S.A. Scandal: God Save Us From the Lawyers : The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/06/nsa-scandal-god-save-us-from-the-lawyers.html

As the repercussions of Edward Snowden’s leaks about domestic surveillance continue to be debated, law professors and lawyers for the Bush and Obama Administrations are out in force, claiming that the spying agencies have done nothing wrong and it’s all much ado about nothing.

In the Financial Times, Philip Bobbitt, a law professor at Columbia who has worked in Democratic and Republican administrations, argued that the National Security Agency, in sweeping up a big part of the nation’s phone records, was upholding the law rather than subverting it. At the influential Lawfare blog, Joel F. Brenner, a legal consultant who between 2006 and 2009 was the head of counterintelligence at the White House, trotted out similar arguments and claimed that the United States “has the most expensive, elaborate, and multi-tiered intelligence oversight apparatus of any nation on Earth.” On the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, Michael Mukasey, who served as Attorney General in the Bush Administration, questioned whether there has even been a meaningful infringement of privacy, writing, “The claims of pervasive spying, even if sincere, appear not merely exaggerated, but downright irrational.”

To which, my reply is: Lord save us from lawyers, especially the big shots who graduate from élite law schools and advise administrations. (Brenner is a Harvard man; Bobbitt and Mukasey are Yalies.) With some honorable exceptions, their primary function is protecting the interests of the political and corporate establishments, often by finding some novel and tendentious way to legitimate their self-interested actions. When lesser mortals object, they turn around and accuse them of being ignorant of the law.

Dans le même article du Akhbar sur les #kissinger_cables : Operation Boulder
►http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/revisiting-us-arab-diplomacy-operation-boulder-and-oil-embargo

As Boston University law professor Susan M. Akram noted in a March 2002 article in Arab Studies Quarterly, “Nixon Administration’s ‘Operation Boulder’ [was] perhaps the first concerted US government effort to target Arabs in the US for special investigation with the specific purpose of intimidation, harassment, and to discourage their activism on issues relating to the Middle East.”

Much of the secrets behind Operation Boulder were only recently discovered. What we know today is that the operation involved stringent reviews and background checks of Arabs, particularly Palestinians, by the FBI, CIA, State Department, and Secret Service. Moreover, much of the information was shared between the Israeli and American security services, as well as pro-Zionist organizations within the US.

Nuclear-Waste Disposal a Growing Fiscal Problem - WSJ.com
►http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904292504576484133479927502.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Quand le Wall Street Journal se remnd compte du coût des déchets nucléaires, et de l’inaction qui entoure cette question...

The fee, which ultimately comes from nuclear-electricity customers as a surcharge of 1/10th of a cent per kilowatt hour, now amounts to about $750 million a year. Counting past expenditures and interest earned, the fund’s balance is about $25 billion.

“It sounds like there’s a piggy bank and there’s all this money that is available for a future [nuclear] repository,” said Richard Stewart, a New York University law professor and co-author of a book on nuclear waste policy. “But there isn’t. Congress has spent it on other things.” The $25 billion, he and others say, amounts to little more than a federal IOU that will need to be repaid.

A group of state regulators and the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade organization, are suing the Department of Energy, seeking to suspend collection of the annual fees utilities pay into the waste fund. “There’s no sense paying a fee if you’re not getting a program for it,” said NEI’s Steven Kraft.

Beyond disposal costs, taxpayers are also potentially liable for damages suffered by the public from a nuclear accident, including those stemming from the spent fuel stored at commercial power plant sites. Under a 1950s law, plant operators currently must carry $375 million of liability insurance for each reactor, after which an industry insurance plan would take over, covering damages up to $12 billion. Any personal injury or property damages in excess of that would be borne by the federal government.