Law Lab Speaker Series >

feb
1
2010

Transparent Citizens and the Rule of Law

Joel R. Reidenberg, Professor of Law and Director, Center on Law and Information Policy, Fordham University

Monday, February 1, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

Joel will discuss "Transparent Citizens and the Rule of Law", an essay that explores the erosion of the boundary between public and private information on the Internet.   The thesis is that the transparency of personal information available online erodes the rule of law in three ways.  First, the transparency of personal information that is created by private sector activities enables government to collect and use personal information available from the private sector in ways that side step political and legal checks and balances. Second, technical self-help in the development of network infrastructure that seeks to assure complete anonymity online may used by individuals and groups to evade legal responsibility and the rule of law.   And third, the transparency of personal information puts national security and legal institutions at risk in ways that will jeopardize faith in the rule of law. The essay concludes with a discussion of governance implications and norms.

About Joel

Joel R. Reidenberg is Professor of Law and the Founding Academic Director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham Law School.  He is a former Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Associate Chief Academic Officer of Fordham University and a former President of the University’s Faculty Senate. 

Reidenberg is an expert on information technology law and policy.   His scholarship has appeared in leading law journals including the Emory Law Journal, Hastings Law Journal, Houston Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Texas Law Review and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.   Outside the United States, he has published widely in Europe and is a co-author of three leading books and monographs on international data privacy law.

Professor Reidenberg has testified before the U.S. Congress on data privacy issues, served as a consultant to both the Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission, and served as a Special Assistant Attorney General for the State of Washington in connection with privacy litigation.  He has also chaired the Section on Defamation and Privacy of the Association of American Law Schools and is a former chair of the association's Section on Law and Computers.

Prior joining the Fordham law faculty Reidenberg practiced law in Washington, DC with the international telecommunications group of the firm Debevoise & Plimpton and has also served as a member of several Advisory Panels for the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment.   He is admitted to the Bars of New York and the District of Columbia.

Links

• John Palfrey liveblogged the talk
  

Click the play button below to start the audio.

Location

Berkman Center for Internet and Society

License

Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported

Copyright Holder

The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Radio Berkman 145: The Future of Transparency and How to Stop It (Adventures in Anonymity Part II)

Transparency challenges the very existence of the Rule of Law. That is the very provocative thesis of today's guest, who suggests that there is a tragedy behind the web's powerful lubricative effect on the flow of information. Data about your address, purchases, academic performance, travel itineraries, likes and dislikes are all quite simple to track down these days at little or no cost. We often give up this information voluntarily, in the interests of cultural participation, or obliviously, when we simply skip a privacy notice. And where it once took teams of archivists and researchers to dig up and collate dirt on people and institutions, today's powerful automated online databases wield personal data over their subjects almost tyrannically, voiding the engineered obscurity of the past, and rendering anonymity obsolete. Joel Reidenberg is the academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University. We sat down with him to ask how we could re-engineer the web to fight transparency's most dangerous effects.

Produced 4 Mar 2010

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