Interview with Thomas Wolf, December 29, 1994 & August 9, 1995

Thomas Wolf was interviewed on December 29, 1994 & August 9, 1995 by Michael J. Birkner & David Hedrick about his service in World War II and involvement in the Nixon administration. He discusses his role in the Air Force Counterintelligence Corps during World War II, and his work with several government agencies, such as the Citizens of Eisenhower and the Office of Economic Opportunity. Wolf also describes the Watergate Scandal and his participation in the trial. Length of Interview: 92 Minutes (Part 1), 47 Minutes (Part 2) Collection Note: This oral history was selected from the Oral History Collection maintained by Special Collections & College Archives. Transcripts are available for browsing in the Special Collections Reading Room, 4th floor, Musselman Library. GettDigital contains the complete listing of oral histories done from 1978 to the present. To view this list and to access selected digital versions please visit -- http://gettysburg.cdmhost.com/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16274coll

Internet Giants as Quasi-Governmental Actors and the Limits of Contractual Consent

Although the government’s data-mining program relied heavily on information and technology that the government received from private companies, relatively little of the public outrage generated by Edward Snowden’s revelations was directed at those private companies. We argue that the mystique of the Internet giants and the myth of contractual consent combine to mute criticisms that otherwise might be directed at the real data-mining masterminds. As a result, consumers are deemed to have consented to the use of their private information in ways that they would not agree to had they known the purposes to which their information would be put and the entities – including the federal government – with whom their information would be shared. We also call into question the distinction between governmental actors and private actors in this realm, as the Internet giants increasingly exploit contractual mechanisms to operate with quasi-governmental powers in their relations with consumers. As regulators and policymakers focus on how to better protect consumer data, we propose that solutions that rely upon consumer permission adopt a more exacting and limited concept of the consent required before private entities may collect or make use of consumer’s information where such uses touch upon privacy interests

Coattail Class Actions: Reflections on Microsoft, Tobacco, and the Mixing of Public and Private Lawyering in Mass Litigation

Ask anyone who follows legal news to name the two biggest litigation news stories in the United States at the start of the twenty-first century, and they will answer without blinking: Microsoft and tobacco. The Microsoft litigation, they will tell you, claims a place in the pantheon of antitrust landmarks that includes Standard Oil, Alcoa, and AT&T. The tobacco litigation is the most massive in a string of mass torts including asbestos, Dalkon Shield, and breast implants; it is arguably the most important public health matter ever litigated. Microsoft and tobacco each fit so well and so interestingly in their own line of antitrust or product liability cases that it would be easy to miss what the two stories have in common. The Microsoft and tobacco litigations each involve allegations of wrongful conduct causing widespread harm, committed by actors so powerful they seemed immune to attack by private litigants. In each case, government lawsuits broke down the barriers to successful litigation, and private litigants, particularly those pursuing class actions, rode the government\u27s coattails. This pattern is not limited to tobacco and Microsoft, nor is it new; in antitrust, securities, civil rights, and consumer fraud litigation, private plaintiffs have been riding government coattails for years. This Article examines coattail class actions and related developments in Microsoft, tobacco, and other recent litigation involving widespread harm. It does not address whether the government entities and private plaintiffs have valid claims in the Microsoft and tobacco cases, nor does it consider whether the underlying substantive law itself is just or wise. For purposes of this discussion, my interest in these cases is not to enter the raging debate over the legal and factual issues in them,9 but rather to look at whether their procedural structure of interdependent public and private actions offers a sensible model for the resolution of claims of widespread harm. Part One looks at the Microsoft antitrust litigation and the tobacco litigation as illustrations of the relationship between government litigation and subsequent class actions. Part Two examines two related developments that mix public and private lawyer roles: the use of private litigators to prosecute government lawsuits, and the nature of recent government recoupment actions. Part Three considers the differences between government lawyers, who owe duties to government entities and face largely political incentives, and class action lawyers, who owe duties to the class and face largely fee-based incentives. With the idea that government lawsuits and private class actions serve different purposes even when targeted at the same conduct, I turn to several specific implications. Part Four looks at implications for government suits. I suggest that government lawyers should consider the issue preclusive value of adjudications, the public value of discovered information, and the impact of settlement agreements that compromise private litigants\u27 remedies or procedural mechanisms. I also suggest that contingent fees are generally inappropriate for government retention of private litigators. Part Five turns to implications for coattail class actions themselves. I contend that while prior government litigation does not render a class action illegitimate, the government action does matter for the outcome of the coattail class action. Prior government litigation substantially increases the likelihood of successful prosecution of the class action, but in some cases it should reduce the likelihood or amount of punitive damages, as well as the amount of legal fees awarded to class counsel. While much of what I discuss in this Article is equally true of individual lawsuits that piggyback on government litigation, I focus on class actions because as representative litigation they share an essential attribute of government actions, and thus present most starkly the question of who should represent the interests of injured citizens in litigation: government officials or class representatives and class counsel

Special Libraries, February 1966

Volume 57, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1966/1001/thumbnail.jp

Open budget data: mapping the landscape

This report offers analysis of the emerging issue of open budget data, which has begun to gain traction amongst advocates and practitioners of financial transparency. Issues and initiatives associated with the emerging issue of open budget data are charted in different forms of digital media. The objective is to enable practitioners – in particular civil society organisations, intergovernmental organisations, governments, multilaterals and funders – to navigate this developing field and to identify trends, gaps and opportunities for supporting it. How public money is collected and distributed is one of the most pressing political questions of our time, influencing the health, well-being and prospects of billions of people. Decisions about fiscal policy affect everyone - determining everything from the resourcing of essential public services, to the capacity of public institutions to take action on global challenges such as poverty, inequality or climate change. Digital technologies have the potential to transform the way that information about public money is organised, circulated and utilised in society, which in turn could shape the character of public debate, democratic engagement, governmental accountability and public participation in decision-making about public funds. Data could play a vital role in tackling the democratic deficit in fiscal policy and in supporting better outcomes for citizens

Carpenter v. United States: How Many Cell Phone Location Points Constitute a Search Under the Fourth Amendment?

In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court will decide whether the government’s acquisition of a suspect’s cell site location information (“CSLI”) during an ongoing criminal investigation is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, and thus requires a showing of probable cause to obtain a warrant. This opinion will have future consequences for Americans and their privacy interests as cell sites continue to be built and CSLI records increasingly contain more private information about cell phone users. This commentary argues that that the necessity of owning and using cell phones renders past tests obsolete. With wavering, subjective expectations of what information is actually private in society today, the Court should thus create a new test that makes a prescriptive claim about expectations of privacy and compares newer technologies with older ones. The Court should hold that obtaining CSLI records without a warrant is an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment

Cross Border Data Flows: Could Foreign Protectionism Hurt U.S. Jobs?: Hearing Before the Subcomm. On Commerce, Mfg. & Trade of the H. Comm. on Energy & Commerce, 113th Cong., Sept. 17, 2014 (Statement of Laura K. Donohue)

Documents released over the past year detailing the National Security Agency’s telephony metadata collection program and interception of international content under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) directly implicated U.S. high technology companies in government surveillance. The result was an immediate, and detrimental, impact on U.S. firms, the economy, and U.S. national security. The first Snowden documents, printed June 5, 2013, revealed that the U.S. government had served orders on Verizon, directing the company to turn over telephony metadata under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. The following day, The Guardian published classified slides detailing how the NSA had intercepted international content under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The type of information obtained ranged from E-mail, video and voice chat, videos, photos, and stored data, to Voice over Internet Protocol, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity, and online social networking details. The companies involved read like a who’s who of U.S. Internet giants: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. More articles highlighting the extent to which the NSA had become embedded in the U.S. high tech industry followed. In September 2013 ProPublica and the New York Times revealed that the NSA had enjoyed considerable success in cracking commonly-used cryptography. The following month the Washington Post reported that the NSA, without the consent of the companies involved, had obtained millions of customers’ address book data: in one day alone, some 444,743 email addresses from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail, and 22,881 from other providers. The extent of upstream collection stunned the public – as did slides demonstrating how the NSA had bypassed the companies’ encryption, intercepting data as it transferred between the public Internet and the Google cloud. Further documents suggested that the NSA had helped to promote encryption standards for which it already held the key or whose vulnerabilities the NSA understood but not taken steps to address. Beyond this, press reports indicated that the NSA had at times posed as U.S. companies—without their knowledge—in order to gain access to foreign targets. In November 2013 Der Spiegel reported that the NSA and the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had created bogus versions of Slashdot and LinkedIn, so that when employees from the telecommunications firm Belgacom tried to access the sites from corporate computers, their requests were diverted to the replica sites that then injected malware into their machines. As a result of growing public awareness of these programs, U.S. companies have lost revenues, even as non-U.S. firms have benefited. In addition, numerous countries, concerned about consumer privacy as well as the penetration of U.S. surveillance efforts in the political sphere, have accelerated localization initiatives, begun restricting U.S. companies’ access to local markets, and introduced new privacy protections—with implications for the future of Internet governance and U.S. economic growth. These effects raise attendant concerns about U.S. national security. Congress has an opportunity to redress the current situation in at least three ways. First, and most importantly, reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would provide for greater restrictions on NSA surveillance. Second, new domestic legislation could extend better protections to consumer privacy. These shifts would allow U.S. industry legitimately to claim a change in circumstance, which would help them to gain competitive ground. Third, the integration of economic concerns at a programmatic level within the national security infrastructure would help to ensure that economic matters remain central to national security determinations in the future