Exploring Race and Racism in the Law School Curriculum: An Administrator\u27s View on Adopting an Antiracist Curriculum

This article provides a candid assessment of the demanding, and rewarding, work that is required to put into action the written words of institutional support for implementing an Antiracist curriculum. This article starts by describing the two Penn State Dickinson Law faculty resolutions that committed the faculty to condemn racism and bias against our Black and Brown brothers and sisters, while committing to teach and learn according to Antiracist pedagogy and best practices. It then describes the resolve to become Antiracist teachers, discusses the investments in curricular policy and reform, and details the bureaucratic processes to accomplish the following: adding a first-year required course on the history of racism and the concept of equal protection of the laws in the United States; adding a J.D. degree requirement that every student take at least one course beyond the first year with subject matter focused on civil rights, equal protection, or social justice; adding a certificate program in Civil Rights, Equal Protection, and Social Justice; and encouraging faculty to re-envision their courses to identify opportunities to integrate discourse about racial equality. The article then explores the knotty but essential task of equipping faculty and staff with the tools needed to deliver an Antiracist curriculum. The law school initiated this task by launching a summer workshop series designed to conduct an honest assessment of the educational community’s past failings while providing the resources needed to alter the law school’s future course. To accomplish these objectives, the workshops embraced a model that encouraged risk taking, allowed for blunt feedback, and created plenty of space for mistakes. In closing, this article offers guidance on how to ensure a sustainable commitment to the delivery of an Antiracist curriculum, including the importance of sharing the implementation work with faculty committees and student organizations. The path from commitment to implementation has involved bumps and curves, some anticipated and others unexpected. As the path continues, a guiding principle remains: to fulfil our responsibilities as legal educators uniquely positioned at “the nexus of power and understanding necessary for change.”This article is one of three interdependent articles authored by Penn State Dickinson Law faculty and staff, and all three articles will be included in a forthcoming volume of the Rutgers Race & The Law Review. These articles are meant to be read together to chart the vision and implementation for building an Antiracist law school and providing a template for an Antiracist legal academy and legal profession. The other two articles in the trilogy are: Danielle M. Conway, Rebekah Saidman-Krauss & Rebecca Schreiber, Building an Antiracist Law School: Inclusivity in Admissions and Retention of Diverse Students—Leadership Determines DEI Success ; and Dermot Groome, Exploring Race and Racism in the Law School Curriculum: Educating Anti-Racist Lawyers

Book Review: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2020) by Nicole Perlroth

In the book, Perlroth traces the development and use of cyber capabilities, focusing on the U.S. government’s unintended role in creating a market for these cyber goods. Her purpose is a straightforward one: to illuminate. Perlroth explains that her goal is to “help shine even a glimmer of light on the highly secretive and largely invisible cyberweapons industry so that we, a society on the cusp of this digital tsunami called the Internet of Things, may have some of the necessary conversations now, before it is too late.”7 She seeks to accomplish this purpose by offering a treatise-like treatment of the subject, defining terms, tracking the historical development of governmental cyber capabilities and the parallel growth of a vulnerability broker industry, identifying key players and entities in the market, and profiling a slew of cyber operations and events. Despite the length and breadth of the book, her thesis is precise and blunt: the U.S. government’s practice of purchasing vulnerabilities for use in law enforcement, intelligence collection, and military operations led to a black market for these tools and an arms race between governments and an array of questionably-motivated private actors. She argues that the U.S. government’s myopic focus on the offensive use of these cyber tools, and its corresponding failure to anticipate or consider the consequences of that offensive focus, led to unexpected and negative results for the United States and the world

Answering the Cyber Oversight Call

In the past few years, a revised cyber strategy, a spate of new cyber authorities, and revamped presidential directives have significantly expanded the cyber capabilities of the U.S. military. This expansion has coincided with a weakening and dispersion of traditional congressional oversight mechanisms, creating a separation of powers mismatch. This mismatch, and the necessarily stealthy features that characterize cyberoperations, inhibit Congress’s ability to gain a comprehensive understanding of the use and deployment of these cyber powers, while obscuring the use of such powers from the public as well. Put bluntly, the traditional congressional oversight mechanisms are not suited to the cyber oversight task. There is a need to find alternative players able to answer the cyber oversight call. To fill this gap, scholars have proposed various “surrogates” and “intermediaries” including foreign allies, local governments, technology companies, and other private sector actors. This Article urges a different approach by examining the consequential role of the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) from the cyber oversight perspective. Although often maligned and misunderstood as the bean counters of the federal government, inspectors general serve critical functions in our constitutional scheme, both as internal checks on abuses of executive power and as conduits of information to the legislative branch. The DoD OIG is uniquely positioned and equipped to fill the gaps in the cyber oversight framework, and to ensure that the political branches are working together to appropriately limit and guide the use of these vast new cyber powers. In sum, this Article explores the DoD OIG’s distinctive ability to answer the cyber oversight call

Book Review: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2020) by Nicole Perlroth

In the book, Perlroth traces the development and use of cyber capabilities, focusing on the U.S. government’s unintended role in creating a market for these cyber goods. Her purpose is a straightforward one: to illuminate. Perlroth explains that her goal is to “help shine even a glimmer of light on the highly secretive and largely invisible cyberweapons industry so that we, a society on the cusp of this digital tsunami called the Internet of Things, may have some of the necessary conversations now, before it is too late.”7 She seeks to accomplish this purpose by offering a treatise-like treatment of the subject, defining terms, tracking the historical development of governmental cyber capabilities and the parallel growth of a vulnerability broker industry, identifying key players and entities in the market, and profiling a slew of cyber operations and events. Despite the length and breadth of the book, her thesis is precise and blunt: the U.S. government’s practice of purchasing vulnerabilities for use in law enforcement, intelligence collection, and military operations led to a black market for these tools and an arms race between governments and an array of questionably-motivated private actors. She argues that the U.S. government’s myopic focus on the offensive use of these cyber tools, and its corresponding failure to anticipate or consider the consequences of that offensive focus, led to unexpected and negative results for the United States and the world

The Role of Satellites and Smart Devices: Data Surprises and Security, Privacy, and Regulatory Challenges

Strava, a popular social media platform and mobile app like Facebook but specifically designed for athletes, posts a “heatmap” with consensually-obtained details about users’ workouts and geolocation. Strava’s heatmap depicts aggregated data of user location and movement by synthesizing GPS satellite data points and movement data from users’ smart devices together with satellite imagery. In January of 2018, a 20-year-old student tweeted that Strava’s heatmap revealed U.S. forward operating bases. The tweet revealed a significant national security issue and flagged substantial privacy and civil liberty concerns. Smart devices, software applications, and social media platforms aggregate consumer data from multiple data collection sources, including device-embedded sensors, cameras, software, and GPS chips, as well as from consumer activities like social media posts, pictures, texts, email, and contacts. These devices and apps utilize satellite data, including GPS, as a fundamental component of their data collection arsenal. We call this little understood, across-device, across-platform, and multi-sourced data aggregation the satellite-smart device information nexus. Given the nature of the technology and data aggregation, no one escapes the satellite and smart device information nexus. We explain the technology behind both satellites and smart devices, and we examine how the satellite-smart device information nexus works. We also address how private industry’s aggregation of data through this nexus poses a threat to individual privacy, civil liberties, and national security. In so doing, we work to fill a marked gap in the privacy and cyber-related legal literature when it comes to analyzing the technology, surveillance capabilities, law, and regulation behind government and commercial satellites together with private industry’s aggregation, use, and dissemination of geolocation and other data from the satellite-smart device information nexus. This lack of awareness about the satellite-smart device information nexus has adverse consequences on individual privacy, civil liberties, and the security of nation states; it impedes informed legislation; and it leaves courts in the dark. A contributing factor to the lack of awareness is that commercial remote sensing and government satellites are regulated by a byzantine scheme of international laws, treaties, organizations, and domestic nation states’ laws that combine to control access to satellite data, sharing of satellite data, licensing, ownership, positioning in space, technical requirements, technical restrictions, and liability for harm caused by satellites. Although the satellite-smart device information nexus involves staggering quantities of personal information, we examine how the nexus falls outside the U.S. electronic surveillance and data legislative scheme and why it is unimpeded by privacy decisions due to a disconnect in U.S. Supreme Court decisions treating aerial surveillance differently than location tracking. We breakdown the complex yet opaque regulatory structure governing commercial remote sensing and government satellites. We examine why the Strava event and others like it are—and will continue to be—the new norm, absent significant legislative and regulatory change. We conclude by providing a suggested roadmap for that legislative and regulatory change

Evaluation study of the suitability of instrumentation to measure ambient NH3 concentrations under field conditions

The uncertainties in emissions of ammonia (NH3) in Europe are large, partially due to the difficulty in monitoring of ambient concentrations due to its sticky nature. In the European Monitoring and Evaluation Program (EMEP) the current recommended guidelines to measure NH3 are by coated annular denuders with offline analysis. This method, however, is no longer used in most European countries and each one has taken a different strategy to monitor atmospheric ammonia due to the increase of commercial NH3 monitoring instrumentation available over the last 20 years. In June 2014, a 3 year project funded under the European Metrology Research Programme, “Metrology for Ammonia in Ambient Air” (MetNH3), started with the aim to develop metrological traceability for the measurement of NH3 in air from primary gas mixtures and instrumental standards to field application. This study presents the results from the field intercomparison (15 instruments) which was held in South East Scotland in August 2016 over an intensively managed grassland. The study compared active sampling methods to a meteorological traceable method which was developed during the project with the aim to produce a series of guidelines for ambient NH3 measurements. Preliminary results highlight both the importance of inlets and management of relative humidity in the measurement of ambient NH3 and of the requirement to carry out frequent intercomparison of NH3 instrumentation. Overall, it would be recommended from this study that a WMO-GAW world centre for NH3 would be established and support integration of standards into both routine and research measurements

Recognizing the Role of Inspectors General in the U.S. Government\u27s Cybersecurity Restructuring Task

Months prior to the 2015 public disclosure of a data breach at the U.S. government’s Office of Personnel and Management (OPM), the Office of the Inspector General for OPM issued a report that identified significant deficiencies and material weaknesses in a number of the agency’s information systems and IT security programs. In response to the 2020 SolarWinds supply chain hack, attributed to Russia, calls are underway for inspectors general to conduct audits and inspections and to review prior inspector general assessments of information systems and vulnerabilities at federal agencies. The use of inspectors general to assess information system vulnerabilities and to conduct post-breach evaluations, as illustrated by the OPM and SolarWinds cyber incidents, reflect a shift in the work undertaken by inspectors general and hint at their ability to fill an important role in efforts to reform the U.S. government’s cybersecurity architecture. This article examines the unheralded and unrecognized work of inspectors general and the special role they are poised to play in the U.S. government’s cybersecurity-related work in the coming years. Inspectors general serve critical but little-understood functions in our constitutional system, both as internal checks on executive power within the administrative state and as conduits of the information necessary to the congressional oversight task. In light of continuing calls for reform of the U.S. government’s cybersecurity architecture, this article examines the consequential position of the inspector general from a new perspective and considers the unique contributions of inspectors general to these reform efforts. Part I identifies flaws in the current organization of the U.S. government’s cybersecurity efforts. It describes the current fractured structure as reflected by more than twenty-three executive branch entities responsible for cybersecurity-related tasks, a disjointed congressional committee structure, and inadequate coordination with private sector partners. Part II explores the common solutions offered to remedy the government’s cybersecurity organizational challenges. These include calls for revising the national cyber strategy, establishing a new cyber director, strengthening the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and increasing its funding, revamping the congressional committee structure, and building a cyber workforce. Notably absent from these calls is recognition that inspectors general have been examining these very issues and offering recommendations. Part III calls attention to the oft-ignored contributions of inspectors general, and examines why inspectors general across the U.S. government are uniquely prepared to support a re-alignment of the government’s cybersecurity-related programs and entities. Part IV catalogs examples of inspectors general already engaged in the work of identifying and evaluating cybersecurity challenges. In conclusion, Part V considers how to effectively engage inspectors general in future reorganizational efforts and suggests avenues for further research

Book Review: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2020) by Nicole Perlroth

In the book, Perlroth traces the development and use of cyber capabilities, focusing on the U.S. government’s unintended role in creating a market for these cyber goods. Her purpose is a straightforward one: to illuminate. Perlroth explains that her goal is to “help shine even a glimmer of light on the highly secretive and largely invisible cyberweapons industry so that we, a society on the cusp of this digital tsunami called the Internet of Things, may have some of the necessary conversations now, before it is too late.”7 She seeks to accomplish this purpose by offering a treatise-like treatment of the subject, defining terms, tracking the historical development of governmental cyber capabilities and the parallel growth of a vulnerability broker industry, identifying key players and entities in the market, and profiling a slew of cyber operations and events. Despite the length and breadth of the book, her thesis is precise and blunt: the U.S. government’s practice of purchasing vulnerabilities for use in law enforcement, intelligence collection, and military operations led to a black market for these tools and an arms race between governments and an array of questionably-motivated private actors. She argues that the U.S. government’s myopic focus on the offensive use of these cyber tools, and its corresponding failure to anticipate or consider the consequences of that offensive focus, led to unexpected and negative results for the United States and the world