Year: 2014

Amnesty International Releases Anti-Spying Software

December 9, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Privacy

Amnesty releases anti-spying program for activists (BBC, 19 Nov 2014) – Amnesty International has released a program that can spot spying software used by governments to monitor activists and political opponents. The Detekt software was needed as standard anti-virus programs often missed spying software, it said. Amnesty said many governments used sophisticated spying tools that could grab images from webcams or listen via microphones to monitor people. “These spying tools are marketed on their ability to get round your bog-standard anti-virus,” said Tanya O’Carroll, an adviser on technology and human rights at Amnesty International. The makers of spying software did extensive testing to ensure that the way they infected and lurked on a computer did not trigger security alerts, she added. Detekt has been developed over the past two years to spot the few telltale signs spying programs do leave. The intense scan it carries out on a hard drive means a computer cannot be used while Detekt is running. Four separate rights groups – Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy International and Digitale Gesellschaft – have worked together to create the spyware spotter, which is available free of charge. The first version of Detekt has been written to run on Windows computers because the people most often being monitored use that software, said Ms O’Carroll.

 

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Where to Find the Largest Free Collection of Law Reviews on the Web

December 5, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Tech for Lawyers

The largest free collection of law reviews on the Web (Law Sites, 24 Nov 2014) –  Law Review Commons is the largest open-access law review portal on the web. It provides access to more than 200 law reviews containing more than 150,000 articles. The oldest law reviews in its collection date back to 1852. The site currently includes law reviews from law schools such as Berkeley, Boston College, Cornell, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Villanova and Yale. Missing from the collection are several top-tier schools such as Harvard, Stanford and Columbia. A search function enables you to find articles on the site. The search is not full text, but rather searches fields such as title, abstract, subject, author, institution, document type and publication name. You can also browse and find law reviews in several ways. A master list arranges all law reviews by their law school. You can also browse law reviews alphabetically by title, by the subject they cover, or by specific works and authors within a subject area. The actual articles are in PDF format. One other feature of the site is a world map showing readership in real time. As articles are downloaded, the location of the downloader is shown on the map and a text box displays the reader’s location in the world and the title of the download.

 

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British Government Spies on Lawyer-Client Communications

December 4, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Privacy

British intelligence spies on lawyer-client communications, government admits (GigaOM, 6 Nov 2014) – After the Snowden leaks, British lawyers expressed fears that the government’s mass surveillance efforts could undermine the confidentiality of their conversations with clients, particularly when those clients were engaged in legal battles with the state. Those fears were well-founded. On Thursday the legal charity Reprieve, which provides assistance to people accused of terrorism, U.S. death row prisoners and so on, said it had succeeded in getting the U.K. government to admit that spy agencies tell their staff they may target and use lawyer-client communications “just like any other item of intelligence.” This is despite the fact that both English common law and the European Court of Human Rights protect legal professional privilege as a fundamental principle of justice. Reprieve noted that the government had previously claimed three times that it could not disclose the information it has now disclosed (PDF) in heavily redacted form. According to that information, the acceptability of spying on lawyer-client communications is largely backed up by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which was recently revised to allow surveillance of all sorts of online channels , as well as of phone calls and emails.

 

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New ABA Website to Aid Immigrant Minors

December 3, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Tech for Justice

ABA launches website to aid unaccompanied minors (VOXXI, 14 Nov 2014) – Child advocates have for months voiced concerns about unaccompanied minors not having an attorney by their side in immigration court, and now the American Bar Association is stepping in to help. The group launched a website this week as a resource for attorneys who want to volunteer their time to help unaccompanied minors navigate through the immigration system. The goal is to get more attorneys to provide unaccompanied minors with legal representation on a pro bono basis. “The ABA steps up when justice is at stake,” American Bar Association President William C. Hubbard said in a statement. “We support legal representation for unaccompanied children in the U.S. immigration court system. We are acting not only out of concern for the welfare of these children, but also because all parties benefit when vulnerable children are competently represented by counsel in adversarial proceedings.” The website is dubbed the Immigrant Child Advocacy Network . It was put together by the American Bar Association’s working group on unaccompanied minors in collaboration with partner organizations, like Kids in Need of Defense and the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The website provides links to resources and training materials on issues related to legal representation of children. It also provides a calendar of ongoing pro bono training opportunities and a list of legal providers who are looking for volunteers to assist children.

 

 

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‘Law Genius’ Site To Collectively Annotate Global Case Law

December 2, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Legal Apps

New crowdsourced law site is part of larger project to ‘annotate the world’ (Law Sites, 17 Nov 2014) – There is something very fitting in the fact that a site that started out deciphering rap lyrics is now turning its attention to making sense of the law. The site, Law Genius , is the newest member of the larger Geniusnetwork of crowdsourced community sites, all of which grew out of the original site, Rap Genius , which was started in 2009 for the purpose of listing and annotating rap lyrics. Soon, users started using the site to annotate all sorts of other stuff, from the collected works of Shakespeare to the roster of the 1986 New York Mets to the warnings on the back of a Tylenol bottle . Last July, the site officially relaunched as Genius, becoming a hub for a range of communities devoted to topics such as rock, literature, history, sports, screen and tech. All are united by the site’s overarching goal, “to annotate the world.” Genius breaks down text with line-by-line annotations, added and edited by anyone in the world. It’s your interactive guide to human culture.Now law is the latest addition to this ambitious effort at global annotation. It is an effort to crowdsource statutes, case law and other legal news. At the helm of the project, as executive editor of Law Genius, is Christine Clarke, a 2010 graduate of Yale Law School who practiced plaintiff-side employment law in Manhattan before joining Law Genius full time. At Law Genius, any registered user can add text and annotate any text. Other users can vote up or down on annotations, or add their own suggestions to the annotations. As you view text, any portion that is highlighted has an annotation. Click on the highlighted text to view the annotation. To add your own annotation, just highlight a selection of text.

 

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What Does It Take to Secure a Network?

December 1, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Security

Who’s minding best practices: A look at what it takes to secure a network (InsideCounsel, 4 Nov 2014) – Most organizations have good intentions to follow “cybersecurity best practices,” but the sticking point comes when deciding what these practices are and how they relate to individual businesses. While lawyers have an ethical duty to protect information under Rule 1.6: Confidentiality of Information and businesses that accept credit cards must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requirements , there is much more to securing a network than following best practices and requirements. Certainly following these practices is important, but following their intent is what makes the difference between protecting a business and performing perfunctory duties. Before the recent spate of breaches on some big-name retailers, you may have thought that with all the rules and regulatory requirements retailers are subject to under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) that their networks would be secure. However, the problem often lies with what these companies are not doing rather than what they are doing. While these companies may have “followed best practices,” they may not have done what would have been best, either because of a lack on their end or on their adviser’s end.

 

 

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