FISA Reform

Congress and the Executive Branch are poised to take up the issue of FISA reform in 2014. What has been missing from the discussion is a comprehensive view of ways in which reform could be given effect—i.e., a taxonomy of potential options. This article seeks to fill the gap. The aim is to deepen the conversation about abeyant approaches to foreign intelligence gathering, to allow fuller discussion of what a comprehensive package could contain, and to place initiatives that are currently under consideration within a broader, over-arching framework. The article begins by considering the legal underpinnings and challenges to the President\u27s Surveillance Program. It then examines how technology has altered the types of information available, as well as methods of transmission and storage. The article builds on this to develop a taxonomy for how a statutory approach to foreign intelligence gathering could be given force. It divides foreign intelligence gathering into two categories: front-end collection and back-end analysis and use. Each category contains a counterpoise structured to ensure the appropriate exercise of Congressionally-mandated authorities. For the front-end, this means balancing the manner of collection with requirements for approval. For the back-end, this means offsetting implementation with transparency and oversight. The article then considers the constituent parts of each category

Secrecy in Educational Practices: Enacting Nested Black Boxes in Cheating and Deception Detection Systems

This paper covers secrecy from the vantage point of recent technological initiatives designed to detect cheating and deception in educational contexts as well as to monitor off-campus social media speech code violations. Many of these systems are developed and implemented by third-party corporate entities who claim practices to be proprietary and secret. The outsourcers involved in these efforts have provided one level of secrecy and educational administrators involved yet another level, thus constructing nested black boxes. Also discussed in this paper is the “paranoid style” of administration, often supported by the surveillance and construction of rosters of potential non-conformists, such as alleged cheaters and speech code violators. The educational technologies described in this article are increasingly applied to workplace practices, with young people being trained in what is deemed acceptable conduct. Secrecy can serve to alter the character of relationships within the educational institutions involved as well as inside the workplaces in which the approaches are increasingly being integrated

"The dearest of our possessions": applying Floridi's information privacy concept in models of information behavior and information literacy

This conceptual paper argues for the value of an approach to privacy in the digital information environment informed by Luciano Floridi's philosophy of information and information ethics. This approach involves achieving informational privacy, through the features of anonymity and obscurity, through an optimal balance of ontological frictions. This approach may be used to modify models for information behavior and for information literacy, giving them a fuller and more effective coverage of privacy issues in the infosphere. For information behavior, the Information Seeking and Communication Model, and the Information Grounds conception, are most appropriate for this purpose. For information literacy, the metaliteracy model, using a modification a privacy literacy framework, is most suitable