Computer Ethics, Spr 2016


Class 7

Week 7 Readings

You should read Chapter 2 of Baase, on Privacy

Debates

New York Magistrate Judge James Orenstein rules that the All Writs Act cannot be used to compel Apple to create special software to unlock an iPhone. This is in the case of Jun Feng, of New York.
http://blogs.reuters.com/alison-frankel/files/2016/02/applebrooklyn-2.29.16order.pdf

But the decision seems to ignore the free-speech issue raised by Apple, and instead focuses on the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which contains the following exception:

A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government’s ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication.

The government is seeking an order justified by the All Writs Act (AWA), not CALEA. Nonetheless, Judge Orenstein argues that in light of the above CALEA language, assistance with decryption is beyond the scope of the AWA. The AWA states that writs to be issued must be "agreeable to the usages and principles of law". Since CALEA suggests (but does not state explicitly!) that decryption is not "agreeable to the usages and principles of law", Apple is off the hook.


The EFF won a victory for Soulseek in its dispute with PayPal last week:

Does your business follow copyright law to the best of its ability? Not good enough. At least that was the case for one long-standing peer-to-peer network, which had its payment processing shut down after more than 14 years of being a loyal PayPal customer.

This sounds terrible! The threat of being cut off from payment processors on a whim is exactly why so many people protested the SOPA and PIPA proposals.

The article at www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/kafkaesque-battle-soulseek-and-paypal-and-why-free-speech-defenders-should-be includes a copyright-enforcement questionnaire from PayPal that SoulSeek answered. But that questionnaire was not enough, and until the EFF intervened, SoulSeek was never able to get a satisfactory answer from PayPal.

Except: SoulSeek is a file-sharing network. They encourage peer-to-peer audio file-sharing. There is no Content-ID-style fingerprinting, apparently, to detect copyrighted content. Their official policy states "you should only share and download files which you are legally allowed to", but, according to the the Wikipedia article, "the above policy is apparently hardly enforced".

So should we feel sympathetic here? Or was PayPal on the right track?

(By the way, when I searched for SoulSeek, lots of fake soulseek clones popped up. They connect you with the real SoulSeek p2p network, but sell the advertising themselves.)


Jurisdiction and privacy
Loyola's policy on email privacy
Advertising
    Target
RFID
SSNs
Price Discrimination

Speech