Author: Abby Shulman

is an aspiring physician and student at Rice University. Beyond working as a writer for The Center, she’s involved with health and service organizations on campus. She likes New Yorker articles, hiking, and stand-up comedy.

Social Security card renewal to be made available online

November 21, 2015 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Government

This past Thursday, the Social Security Administration announced that citizens would be able to apply for replacement Social Security card documents online. Although the program only applies to basic card replacements, it will expedite the process for many Americans who had to physically wait in line at a government building in order to fill out the paperwork for renewal. The program will first be introduced to Wisconsin and Washington state before extending to the rest of the nation.

Nancy Berryhill, the deputy commissioner for operations at the Social Security Administration, said, “It’s not only convenient for the public, but also for our field employees. It’s something we’ve been thinking about for a long time.”

The development of the program was lengthy due to the issues of authenticating and securing individuals’ identities. Those who apply for replacement cards online will have to sign up for a “my Social Security” account and answer personal questions from their credit history, provided by the Equifax credit-card rating bureau. The account will also ask for a driver’s license or state ID card numbers, to be compared to the records of individual states. Lastly, a fraud protection review will scan the submitted information for a authenticity.

Rob Klopp, the deputy commissioner of systems and the agency’s chief information officer, said that the agency is still researching methods to recognize fraud. “We’re going to learn how others try to game us,” he said.

Article via The Washington Post, November 19, 2015

Photo: The Bank of Queue via tubb [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

How to use social media evidence in court

November 14, 2015 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Court, Privacy, Social Media

In February of 2014, Maria Nucci attempted to sue Target after she slipped and fell on a work shift. In response, Target requested access to her Facebook profile in order to gather evidence on Nucci’s quality of life following the accident.

Saying that she had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” because of Facebook’s privacy settings, Nucci declined, and 36 photographs were removed from her profile two days following her objection.

The case was taken to the Fourth District Court of Appeals for the State of Florida, where in January of 2015, the three-judge panel ruled in favor of Target’s request for Nucci’s Facebook photographs.

“Because information that an individual shares through social networking websites like Facebook may be copied and disseminated by another,’ the expectation that such information is private, in the traditional sense of the word, is not a reasonable one,” the panel ruled.

Courts are still navigating how to use social media as evidence in legal cases. Currently, the main two issues complicating social media’s role in the courthouse are privacy, as in the Target case, and authentication.

Many social media sites require only an email to sign up, and those who require more don’t use any system to verify whether the person creating an account is in fact who they say they are.

Gibson Dunn partner Jennifer Rearden sums up the difficulties in using social media profiles as evidence: “Anybody can put anything on the Internet, and most Internet sites are not monitored for accuracy, so just because you have a print-out of someone’s profile page doesn’t mean you actually have confirmation they are controlling that page.”

 
Article via Legaltech News, November 2, 2015

Photo: Tumblr via Corrado [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Facebook’s new report on government data requests

November 13, 2015 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Citizen Justice, Government, Social Media

Government requests for data about Facebook users increased 18 percent to 17,577 compared to the latter half of 2014, according to Facebook’s most recent transparency report. Beyond requests for information, governments insisted that the company restrict content that violated local laws. The amount of restricted content grew 112 percent to 20,568 pieces; a little over 15,000 of these were restricted by India. No other country limited over 1,000 pieces of data.

Facebook reported that it restricted content in India that was considered by the nation’s government to be “anti-religious and hate speech that could cause unrest and disharmony within India.”

Facebook publishes global government data request reports biannually, including the percentage of requests the company agrees to. Eighty percent of U.S. government data requests are granted.

Chris Sonderby, Facebook’s deputy general, introduced the report with a blog post: “As we have emphasized before, Facebook does not provide any government ‘back doors’ or direct access to people’s data. If a request appears to be deficient or overly broad, we push back hard and will fight in court, if necessary.”

Data on intelligence agency requests is released with less specificity, only in ranges of 1,000. According to the most recent report, the number of intelligence agency requests numbered somewhere between 0 and 999 for the first half of 2015.

Article via CNET, November 10, 2015

Photo: Mark Zuckerberg Keynote – SXSW 2008 via kris krüg

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Former Reddit CEO urges women and minorities to “Speak up” against discrimination

November 12, 2015 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Business, Citizen Justice

In March of 2015, Reddit’s former CEO Ellen Pao lost a widely publicized discrimination case against venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. Despite the loss, Pao’s advice for tackling sexism and racism in Silicon Valley is to continue to “Speak up.”

Pao published an essay about her battles with discrimination in law and tech on Lena Dunham’s website Lenny.

“Unfortunately, some people just don’t treat men and women, white and minorities, heterosexuals and LGBTQs as equals. We could all work harder and better than everyone else, but we weren’t getting a fair shot to rise to the top,” Pao observed after entering the tech industry.

Yet, according to Pao, it’s (gradually) getting better. She cites women and minorities’ willingness to share “others’ bad behavior, data, and their own experiences publicly” as the main source of progress, and encourages people to continue to take part in public conversation about issues affecting them.

Pao’s high-profile discrimination case, though unsuccessful on surface-level, initiated conversations that lead companies like Apple, Google and Twitter to actively pursue diversity in their workforces.

Reddit users complained that Pao was engaging in censorship when she shut down five forums associated with online harassment. After receiving a petition with over 200,000 signatures for her to step down, Pao resigned from her position of interim CEO.

“I was called the ‘most hated person on the Internet’; a recent article even called me a ‘pariah of Silicon Valley’,” Pao admits. In the face of such hostility, she continues to advocate boldness and offer solidarity: “Don’t be silent… You are not alone. There are millions of women and men who are supporting you and want you to succeed.”

Article via CNET, November 10, 2015

Photo: Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network 2014 – Austin via Dell Inc. [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

International cyberwar policy to be updated

November 9, 2015 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Citizen Justice, Cybercrime, Human Rights

International law experts are on track to publish a manual amending the current Geneva convention for cyberwar in late 2016. The Tallin Manual 2.0 – an update of the original Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare—is backed by a NATO-run military think tank based in Estonia.

Military strategists deem cyberspace the fifth dimension of warfare, the others being land, air, sea and space. An example of an “armed attack” in cyberspace is the Stuxnet worm, an Israeli-U.S. programmed computer virus that caused severe disruptions to Iran’s nuclear plants. By the original manual, similar attacks in the future would legally validate proportional retaliation, considered in this case to be self-defense.

The Tallinn Manual 2.0 will discuss peacetime international law, including human rights law in regards to cyberspace. The current question begin argued is whether international human rights norms apply to different widely practiced cyber activities, such as the collection of metadata by national governments.

“If the answer is yes, we then have to examine whether the state has actually violated the individual’s rights. For instance, assuming the collection of metadata implicates human rights norms, under what circumstances is a state authorized to engage in such activities?” asks Liis Vihul, managing editor of the Tallinn Manual and legal researcher at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.

Additionally, the updated manual will include sections on diplomatic law, the responsibilities of international organizations, global telecommunications law, and peace operations.

Article via The Register, October 12, 2015

Photo: Satsop Nuclear Plant via Michael B. [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Bloomerg hosts Big Law diversity conferences

November 7, 2015 Abby Shulman Leave a comment In the Law, Legal News

Bloomberg Bureau of National Affairs (Bloomberg BNA) hosted Big Law Business Diversity and Inclusion Conferences in New York City and San Francisco throughout the past two weeks. The events helped facilitate the collaboration of some of the most prominent in-house and law firm leaders, in addition to human resource specialists, to create solutions to diversity problems in law firms and corporate legal groups.

The Chief Legal Officers of around 500 major corporations signed a pledge in 1999 to improve the diversity of their teams. Sixteen years later, only minimal progress has been made. Though one third of the U.S. population and one fifth of law school graduates belong to a minority group, less than 7 percent of law firm partners and 9 percent of general counsels of large corporations are black, Latino, Asian American, or Native American.

As Bloomberg BNA states below one of its released videos from the conference, “It is common knowledge that the legal community remains one of the least diverse.” Though law firms have made some improvements in thinking about diversity during the hiring process, “[r]etaining and developing those individuals and leveraging the diverse perspectives they convey is where the true challenge lies.”

Bloomberg BNA has posted videos from the conference, one of the most popular being “Inclusion Strategies: Retain and Promote” for those who could not attend the events.

Article via Above the Law, November 6, 2015

Photo: Scania Executive Board 2010 via Scania Group [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]