My paper in Columbia Business Law Review—“Buying You: The Government’s Use of Fourth-Parties to Launder Data About ‘the People’“—was recently released from the printer.  The paper discusses private companies that gather, aggregate and analyze data for the government, but due to constitutional doctrines and statutory loopholes are able to do so in ways the government could not do on its own.  The information at issue is gathered from fairly typical public and private sources, but is not limited to just those.  In particular, because of how these doctrines and statutes have developed, those who move their data onto servers maintained by others (cloud computing) will give up the very protections that the framers believed were key to the Fourth Amendment.  I conclude by discussing proposals, including a suggestion of my own, to cope with these issues.

The abstract is available after the jump. (more…)

Fourth Amendment, Government, Privacy

Carl Malamud is seeking the position of Public Printer of the United States.  Mr. Malamud is a technologist and a well known advocate of the public domain.  He was responsible for creating the SEC‘s filing database (EDGAR) and the PTO‘s patent database.  I endorse Mr. Malamud, and you should too.
Cross Posted from The Spontaneous Huddle

Government, Intellectual Property