Information Disorder Machines

Weaponized narrative is an attack that seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and will. By generating confusion, complexity, and political and social schisms, it confounds response on the part of the defender. A fast-moving information deluge is an ideal environment for this kind of adversarial attack. A firehose of narrative attacks gives the targeted populace little time to process and evaluate. It is cognitively disorienting and confusing – especially if the opponents barely realize what’s occurring. Opportunities abound for emotional manipulation undermining the opponent’s will to resist. The following report captures the goals, subject matter expert inputs, raw data, and findings of Arizona State University’s Threatcasting Lab Workshop exploring the future of Weaponized Narrative. The findings exposed multiple threat areas and the coming of information disorder machines (IDMs) that could harm individuals, organizations, and even the entire United States of America. To empower people and organizations to disrupt, mitigate and recover from these potential threats the findings in this report identify not only specific threats but also provide recommendations through which organizations and individuals can disrupt, mitigate, and recover from the future of effects of IDMs.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/aci_books/1038/thumbnail.jp

Four Common Misconceptions About Copyright Piracy

Copyright piracy is one of the most difficult, yet important, transnational problems in the twenty-first century. Although legal literature has discussed copyright piracy extensively, commentators rarely offer a grand unified theory on this global problem. Rather, they give nuanced analyses, discussing the many aspects of the problem-political, social, economic, cultural, and historical. This nuanced discussion, however, is missing in the current public debate. To capture the readers\u27 emotion and to generate support for proposed legislative and executive actions, the debate often oversimplifies the complicated picture by overexagerrating a particular aspect of the piracy problem or by offering an abbreviated, easy-to-understand, yet somewhat misleading version of the story. Such oversimplification is dangerous, for it creates misconceptions that not only confuse the public as to the cause and extent of the problem, but also mislead policymakers into finding solutions that fail to attack the crux of the piracy problem. In light of this shortcoming, this Article discusses four common misconceptions about copyright piracy: (1) Copyright piracy is merely a cultural problem; (2) copyright piracy is primarily a development issue; (3) copyright piracy is a past phenomenon for technologically-advanced countries; and (4) copyright piracy is a necessary byproduct of authoritarian rule. It then attempts to reconfigure the misguided public debate on copyright piracy by underscoring the need to focus on the copyright divide - the gap between those who have stakes in the copyright regime and those who do not. This Article concludes by warning that the United States might not be able to eradicate the piracy problem unless its legislators and policymakers are willing to change the lawmaking process by taking into account the interests of both the stakeholders and nonstakeholders

Online Privacy and the First Amendment: An Opt-In Approach to Data Processing

An individual has little to no ability to prevent online commercial actors from collecting, using, or disclosing data about her. This lack of individual choice is problematic in the Big Data era because individual privacy interests are threatened by the ever increasing number of actors processing data, as well as the ever increasing amount and types of data being processed. This Article argues that online commercial actors should be required to receive an individual’s opt-in consent prior to data processing as a way of protecting individual privacy. I analyze whether an opt-in requirement is constitutionally permissible under the First Amendment and conclude that an opt-in requirement is fully consistent with the First Amendment rights of data processors

Federal Search Commission - Access, Fairness, and Accountability in the Law of Search

Should search engines be subject to the types of regulation now applied to personal data collectors, cable networks, or phone books? In this article, we make the case for some regulation of the ability of search engines to manipulate and structure their results. We demonstrate that the First Amendment, properly understood, does not prohibit such regulation. Nor will such interventions inevitably lead to the disclosure of important trade secrets. After setting forth normative foundations for evaluating search engine manipulation, we explain how neither market discipline nor technological advance is likely to stop it. Though savvy users and personalized search may constrain abusive companies to some extent, they have little chance of checking untoward behavior by the oligopolists who now dominate the search market. Against the trend of courts that would declare search results unregulable speech, this article makes a case for an ongoing conversation on search engine regulation

The Developing Legal Infrastructure and the Globalization of Information: Constructing a Framework for Critical Choices in the New Millennium Internet -- Character, Content and Confusion

This paper reviews recent attempts to extend traditional property rights and other information controls and regulations into new media, such as cyberspace, primarily the World Wide Web. It reviews developments in copyright, trademark, trademark dilution, misappropriation, trespass, censorship, tort, privacy and other legal doctrines as they are reflected in recent United States case law and legislation, and to a lesser extent, in international agreements. Legal problems often arise because there is a conflict of viewpoints in how to best characterize space on the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web. Some argue that traditional ownership rights should apply, or perhaps a model of limited property rights, which assumes an implied license to trespass or move within that space, e.g., to visit or to link to another website. Others believe that private ordering systems, like contract law, should dominate the negotiation of information boundaries. Still, others see the Internet as the last open frontier, or at least, as the last green space or commons. This debate is assessed in light of several implications for information in the new millennium, i.e.,the post-national era, as it is naive to assume that simply because borders may dissolve or boundaries may expand through technology, that information access and equity will also naturally increase