11,687 research outputs found

    The Refund Booth: Using the Principle of Symmetric Information to Improve Campaign Finance Regulation

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    On March 22, 2006, Professor of Law, Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s twenty-sixth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: The Refund Booth: Using the Principle of Symmetric Information to Improve Campaign Finance Regulation. The article, The Secret Refund Booth, was co-authored with Professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale University. Ian Ayres is a lawyer and an economist. He is the William K. Townsend Professor of Law and Anne Urowsky Professorial Fellow in Law at Yale Law School and a Professor at Yale\u27s School of Management. He is the editor of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. Professor Ayres is a regular commentator on public radio’s Marketplace and a columnist for Forbes magazine and regularly writes opeds for The New York Times. He received his B.A. (majoring in Russian studies and economics) and J.D. from Yale and his Ph.D in economics from M.I.T. Professor Ayres clerked for the Honorable James K. Logan of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. He has previously taught at Illinois, Northwestern, Stanford, and Virginia law schools and has been a research fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Professor Ayres has published eight books and over 100 articles on a wide range of topics

    The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age

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    In 2013, the Supreme Court tacitly conceded that the expectations-of-privacy test used since 1967 to assess claims of Fourth Amendment violations was inadequate. It asserted that the previous property-based test for Fourth Amendment violations had never despite widespread agreement to the contrary been overruled. The Court compounded its artfulness by applying a new, significantly weaker trespass test that, like the expectations-of-privacy test, enjoys no legal pedigree. This new trespass test, which is to be applied together with the expectations-of-privacy test, suffers from the same defect as the test it purportedly supplements. It does not require the government to respect private property rights absent probable cause. Part I describes Olmstead v. United States, an early missed opportunity to have created a pragmatic Fourth Amendment trespass test that set the stage for the unpredictable and unprincipled jurisprudence that Justice Brandeis\u27 ill-conceived dissent later inspired. Part II explains how the expectations-of-privacy test that originated with Katz v. United States in 1967 allowed the Court to put sensitive records and communications as well as contraband beyond the Fourth Amendment\u27s scope. Katz also helped turn the ever-growing number of pervasive corporations against their customers and into surveillance agents for the government. Part III demonstrates how Katz\u27s superfluous and sweeping pronouncements about privacy expectations added no significant constitutional protection that the trespass test it supplanted did not already afford. Instead, it enabled the erosion of significant rights that had existed. Jones consciously perpetuates these flaws, affording courts no help in adjudicating Fourth Amendment claims involving new technology. Part IV shows that, in federal fraud cases, the Court identifies property interests using a pragmatic, flexible, common-law approach consistent with the pre-Katz trespass test. It argues that this same analysis could be applied to Fourth Amendment claims, resolving the problems that the expectations-of-privacy approach has generated

    Understanding digital intelligence and the norms that might govern it

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    Abstract: This paper describes the nature of digital intelligence and provides context for the material published as a result of the actions of National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. It looks at the dynamic interaction between demands from government and law enforcement for digital intelligence, and at the new possibilities that digital technology has opened up for meeting such demands. The adequacy of previous regimes of legal powers and governance arrangements is seriously challenged just at a time when the objective need for intelligence on the serious threats facing civil society is apparent. This paper suggests areas where it might be possible to derive international norms, regarded as promoting standards of accepted behaviour that might gain widespread, if not universal, international acceptance, for the safe practice of digital intelligence

    Email record keeping in the government sector: a case study of Malaysia

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    Email has become the main means of correspondence, displacing the letter with its conventions and procedures developed over centuries. Every organisation needs to develop and implement policies to manage email as records of evidence of transactions and as a source of information. This study aimed to critically explore the management of email in the context of the management of information and record keeping in the transition to the digital. The objectives of the study were: To explore the legal and regulatory environment in relation to the Malaysian Government and the information it creates and holds; to explore the evolution of email recordkeeping by the Malaysian Government; to critically review existing policies, guidelines and systems for capturing and managing email by the Malaysian Government from a record keeping perspective; and to investigate the current practices in managing email in a selected part of the Malaysian Government against existing policies and guidelines, in part to determine if the latter were clear and unambiguous. It highlights the fact that no in-depth case study of email management has been published previously. In the public sector there are many examples of poor email management. For instance, Michael Gove, when UK Secretary of State for Education, conducted government business using his wife’s personal email account; and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email account and server for both government and personal business. The context of this thesis is the introduction by the Malaysian government of a project that will provide a free email account for every citizen over eighteen to allow them to access e-Government services through a single sign-on user ID, as part of the move to e-government in Malaysia to deliver its Vision 2020. The research is based on a case study of the implementation of this initiative and the accompanying system for managing email at a selected government ministry in Malaysia; it is based on interviews with twelve participants with different roles across three departments and the two providers of policies and guidelines. The design of interview questions was based around the records continuum model and is four elements, the creation, capture, organisation and pluralisation of information. The findings suggest that email has been accepted by the government as records and evidence mandated by Malaysia’s National Archives Act 2003. Yet not all government servants accept emails as records, largely as a consequence of poor project planning and faulty design of the Digital Document Management System (DDMS) for email management. The DDMS has been developed to ensure that the government manages its email, and other electronic records, according to international standards embodied in ISO 16175:2 (2011), which has been adopted nationally as MS ISO 16175:2 (2012). The main factors influencing the implementation of the DDMS in the government sector are people, processes and technology. The DDMS project has been seen as an IT project, and not a records management project, and consequently has failed to meet the requirements for a digital records management system. This explains why some government servants are reluctant to accept email as a record. Project management, change management and quality management should have been central during the system implementation process, but were found to be either inadequately addressed or completely overlooked. The findings conclude that email management can be markedly improved by promoting information culture and awareness of the importance of managing email records. This case study contributes to the evolution of record keeping policy and practice in a former UK dependency during the transition to the digital environment and in the identification of good practice that could be applicable in other similar national government contexts

    The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age

    Get PDF
    In 2013, the Supreme Court tacitly conceded that the expectations-of-privacy test used since 1967 to assess claims of Fourth Amendment violations was inadequate. It asserted that the previous property-based test for Fourth Amendment violations had never despite widespread agreement to the contrary been overruled. The Court compounded its artfulness by applying a new, significantly weaker trespass test that, like the expectations-of-privacy test, enjoys no legal pedigree. This new trespass test, which is to be applied together with the expectations-of-privacy test, suffers from the same defect as the test it purportedly supplements. It does not require the government to respect private property rights absent probable cause. Part I describes Olmstead v. United States, an early missed opportunity to have created a pragmatic Fourth Amendment trespass test that set the stage for the unpredictable and unprincipled jurisprudence that Justice Brandeis\u27 ill-conceived dissent later inspired. Part II explains how the expectations-of-privacy test that originated with Katz v. United States in 1967 allowed the Court to put sensitive records and communications as well as contraband beyond the Fourth Amendment\u27s scope. Katz also helped turn the ever-growing number of pervasive corporations against their customers and into surveillance agents for the government. Part III demonstrates how Katz\u27s superfluous and sweeping pronouncements about privacy expectations added no significant constitutional protection that the trespass test it supplanted did not already afford. Instead, it enabled the erosion of significant rights that had existed. Jones consciously perpetuates these flaws, affording courts no help in adjudicating Fourth Amendment claims involving new technology. Part IV shows that, in federal fraud cases, the Court identifies property interests using a pragmatic, flexible, common-law approach consistent with the pre-Katz trespass test. It argues that this same analysis could be applied to Fourth Amendment claims, resolving the problems that the expectations-of-privacy approach has generated
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